Tizen holds the promise on shipping on lots of different devices. Samsung has already been shipping the Samsung NX-300M Camera for the last month or so but Today at the Tizen Developer Summit, Samsung has officially announced that this camera is actually running Tizen!
So, Tizen is now shipping… On a camera. On a related note, Samsung has let out some details of Tizen 3.0, planned for next year. It’s going 64bit, will gain multiuser support, and will switch from X to Wayland.
Samsung NX-300M Camera […] is actually running Tizen […] Tizen 3.0, planned for next year […] will switch from X to Wayland.
So if my transitive reasoning is correct, that camera with the current version of Tizen actually has Xorg running on it??? Wow. Just wow.
Edited 2013-11-12 03:24 UTC
This is nothing to be amazed, X servers for embedded POSIX OSs exist even before Linus thought about creating Linux.
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=63693&url=htt…
I think he is more amazed about the overhead Samsung was ready to accept.
Just because it implements the X Windowing system does not mean it runs Xorg. There’s many lighter alternatives to Xorg if you are willing to hunt them down
Sure, but any implementation of X11 protocol would be much of overhead for a fullscreen OS, particularly on camera where even 2D acceleration beyond single hardware scaler is clutter.
I think a lot of it has to do with perception. X being bloated was an issue when machines had 8 megs of ram. But I assume the camera is using a fast SOC with plenty of memory, so it makes sense to get things to market quicker and which people can develop for today.
It’s not ideal, but the speed of modern silicon buys a lot of latitude.
So we have a decent SOC, what can we do with it? I know, let’s make it run slow and make the camera sluggish.
Oh, you apparently misunderstood me. Let’s imagine Samsung developed in-house wonderful power-efficient memory-preserving X11 implementation, which outperforms every other X11 implementation in every aspect. Now, let’s be generous and say it only implements a subset of X11. Still, it is a huge waste of camera’s processing power, because it doesn’t add value to the camera: it doesn’t help with focus, color management, lens positioning… It only has to deal with displaying photos, where it doesn’t actually help, because all camera needs to display photos is:
1. hardware-accelerated scaler (zoom in/out),
2. hardware-accelerated compositor (a simplistic one, allowing to overlap an image on top of another: osd, button labels, dialogs),
3. specialized DSP (for junk cameras – effects, frames, other similar childish toys; though one used for more or less tricky stuff like autofocus, balance, denoise filter, JPEG optimiser, etc. may be reused here, as it must be otherwise idle at display time).
I believe, Samsung does X11 on this camera not to improve camera, but to improve user experience with camera-related tasks on their phones.
The meego phone Nokia N9 had Xorg too. Interestingly it had a smoother UI than most Android phones at that time.
Android UI is only hardware accelerated starting with version 3.0.
http://source.android.com/devices/graphics.html
Exactly, meaning that the N9 got better performance just because it was running X
Android being slow doesn’t necessarily mean N9 with Meego was super smooth either.
I’ve used an N9 and it certainly slowed down at times. Miles ahead of Android at the time but it wasn’t really a high bar either.
True, i’ll admit that unless someone can show me a benchmark of Meego and Android running on the same hardware, all this is just comparing apples and oranges anyway
N9 HW is roughly equivalent to Nexus S, with exception of N9 havin 1Gig of ram.