I just heard Dirk Hohndel give the OSCON 2009 Intel keynote for Imad Sousou. Here are some notes I took from the Dirk’s talk:
Dirk

is the chief open source technologist at Intel and this is the third year he has stepped in for Imad at the last minute at OSCON.

It started out or iginally as a Linux product. Now there are products available from Windows, Linux and newly announced ChromeOS.

It’s a hot category. To show how this works, take the Netbook.

Intel has gone from being a skeptic to being a major contributor to open source.

“Done” means the CPU and disk are idle and ready to do work. Fast boot is an early priority. If it’s longer than 15 seconds, it’s taking too long. We started from scratch to create a place where everything can be plugged in and are easily extensible. Graphics presentation – things have not changed much in Linux graphics since the 80s. Graphics Execution Manager kernel memory – management in the kernel. Safety – X server can now run without running as the superuser, so now you can run things much safer. Instead, do it in the kernel. So we need to bring up

the user experience as soon as possible. Kernel Mode Setting – don’t want the screen to flip between graphics and text mode to get the X server to set the right mode.
user interfaces – we acquired a company that provides for actors which behave with physics. How are netbooks different and what Intel has done to enhance them:
Fast – don’t make the user wait. We have added an asynchronous scheduler
for the kernel for I/O initialization. Connected there are a lot of things which need to be connected from wifi, blue tooth, – wimax, etc. Disk tends to be slow, so bring up the disk as quickly as po ssible and start reading in the things which you need for bringing things up. Do slow things as early as possibe, initialize the DHCP servic es, probe HW that will take a long time. Then, we are extending open source telephony by starting from scratch and created
the ofono project with Nokia to achieve this. We need to be done with bo oting as quickly as possible.

software.intel.com