pertwk Chapter 433 The First Prototype of Spark OS
Chapter 433 The First Prototype of Spark OS
When Wang Jianguo called, Ling Yun was staring blankly at Xinvino's OLED yield report in his office. He didn't answer the phone until it rang three times.
"Mr. Ling, get running!"
"What's running?"
"System. Spark OS. It's running on the development board."
Ling Yun threw the report on the table, grabbed his coat, and headed out. But at the door, he turned back, stuffed the yield report into a drawer, and locked it.
The systems department of the R&D center is located at the very back of the third floor; you have to swipe your access card twice to get in.
Inside was a large, windowless room. The air conditioner was set to its lowest temperature, and cold air poured down from the vents in the ceiling. A dozen monitors were lined up in a row, and the desktop was piled high with development boards and cables, a tangled mess like a spider web.
Wang Jianguo was squatting in front of the innermost worktable. Hearing footsteps, he turned his head, and a row of beads of sweat on his forehead glistened in the cold air.
"Come and see."
Ling Yun walked over and saw a green ARM development board over his shoulder, with a ribbon cable connected to an LCD screen the size of a fingernail.
The screen was lit up, displaying a dark blue background with several icons in the center. One of the icons was crookedly placed in the upper left corner, like a wallpaper that had been pasted crookedly.
"Can you move?"
Wang Jianguo didn't answer, but instead tapped the screen with his finger. The crooked icon trembled, and a text box popped up with the words "Hello World." The text was in bold Song typeface, the strokes so thick they were almost blurred together.
"Currently, we only have this one application," Wang Jianguo said. "Clicking it brings up a pop-up window. The others haven't been integrated yet."
Lingyun picked up the development board and flipped it over to look at the back. There were at least a dozen jumpers on the board, with solder joints of varying sizes. Two of the wires were only held together with tape and were wobbling precariously.
"You call this running?"
"If it can interact, then it's running," Wang Jianguo said, scratching his head, his fingernails still covered in rosin. "Last night, Li Mo got the underlying driver of the graphics framework working, and we worked through the night to install the desktop manager. We only managed to get it working again around 7 a.m. this morning." He yawned as he spoke, then quickly covered his mouth, "Sorry."
Lingyun placed the development board back on the table and swiped his finger to the left on the screen. The desktop didn't move. He swiped again, still nothing. On the third swipe, all the icons on the screen jumped one space to the left, the movement as jerky as pulling radishes from mud.
"Swipe to switch desktops. This is the gesture interaction designed by Li Mo," Wang Jianguo leaned over to explain, "but the frame rate is too low now, and the sampling is not enough. Sometimes it takes several swipes to get a response."
What's the frame rate?
"fifteen."
"What's the target?"
"sixty."
"A fourfold difference," Ling Yun withdrew his finger, "What's the problem?"
Wang Jianguo pulled a notebook from the table, flipped to a page filled with flowcharts and arrows. "Three bottlenecks. First, the GPU driver isn't fully adapted yet; it's currently using the CPU for rendering, which is incredibly inefficient. Second, the touch chip's sampling rate is only set to 60 Hz, which is misaligned with the screen refresh rate. Third, the desktop manager's animation engine is poorly written; it redraws every frame without optimizing for dirty areas."
Ling Yun listened and nodded. "And the time?"
"GPU driver adaptation will probably take another three weeks," Wang Jianguo said, looking down at his notebook. "The sampling frequency of the touch chip needs to be adjusted to 120 Hz. We need to get Fingerworks to work on the firmware modification, which should be done in two weeks. The animation engine reconstruction is more complicated. Li Mo's team doesn't have enough manpower, so it will take at least a month and a half."
"A month and a half is too long."
"I can transfer people," Wang Jianguo said. "I can pull three people from the application framework group, and it can be done within a month."
"smoke."
Wang Jianguo quickly jotted down a note in his notebook.
Ling Yun swiped up from the bottom of the screen again. The screen didn't respond. He swiped again, and this time a long bar popped up with several small squares drawn on it. One of the small squares displayed a waveform, which was a straight line that was trembling slightly.
"This is--"
"A microphone," Wang Jianguo said, "a test application I wrote on a whim last night. When you speak into it, the waveform jumps."
Ling Yun looked down at the straight line that was still trembling slightly. "Why is it shaking?"
"Air conditioning," Wang Jianguo pointed to the ceiling, "low-frequency noise, inaudible to the human ear, but detectable by the microphone, the underlying filter hasn't been added yet."
Ling Yun gently placed the development board back on the table. "Wang Jianguo."
"Um?"
How many hours did you sleep last night?
Wang Jianguo counted on his fingers. "I slept the day before yesterday, but yesterday... I didn't." He paused, then added, "Li Mo didn't sleep either. He's in the next room, and he just fell asleep on the table. He didn't dare wake you."
Ling Yun walked around the worktable and pushed open the door next door. The small room contained only a folding cot and a chair. Li Mo was slumped over the table, his face buried in his arms, his left hand resting on the keyboard. Next to the keyboard was a bowl of instant noodles, with a layer of red oil left at the bottom, which had already solidified into a thin film.
Ling Yun picked up the instant noodle bowl and placed it in the nearby trash can. The bottom of the bowl tapped against the rim of the trash can, making a soft sound. Li Mo stirred slightly but didn't wake up.
Lingyun closed the door and returned to the large room.
"Regarding the applications," he told Wang Jianguo, "we'll port Xingyu, UCWEB, and the handwriting input method first. I want to see a version that can run on them within a month."
"We're already working on the integration with UCWEB," Wang Jianguo said. "They've provided the SDK interface, but we still need to modify a lot of things to adapt it. He Xiaopeng is quite an interesting guy. He came over last week and stayed for three days, watching our integration testing. When he left, he said that if his UCWEB couldn't run, he would move his server over here."
Ling Yun didn't reply. He stared at the icons on the screen, his index finger slowly tracing circles on the desktop.
"You just said there's only one application right now."
"right."
"Add three. Add a music player too."
"Just make something very simple that can play MP3s."
Wang Jianguo lowered his head and made another note in his notebook, then looked up. "President Ling, that app store you mentioned, the things in the app store will be installed on this desktop in the future, right?"
"right."
Wang Jianguo turned to look at the green development board, its jumpers flying everywhere, tape dangling loosely, and the screen as small as a cookie. He stared at it for a while, then reached out and rubbed the edge of the screen, removing a fingerprint.
"It's a bit ugly."
"It doesn't matter if I'm ugly," Lingyun said. "As long as I can run, that's fine."
He turned to leave, but stopped at the door. "Tell Li Mo to go to the cafeteria for a hot meal when he wakes up. Instant noodles don't count."
"He'd never listen to you."
"Then bring the food over and put it on his table."
The temperature in the hallway was a completely different world from that inside. Ling Yun stood in the doorway and took a deep breath. The air smelled of heated printed circuit boards mixed with the burnt odor of rosin and solder, making his nostrils dry.
As he walked toward the stairwell, he passed the tea room and heard people talking quietly inside.
"...Did the screen really light up?"
"It's lit up! I saw it with my own eyes. Engineer Wang just tapped it with his finger, and the words popped up. Although it was lagging like a slideshow, it was lit up after all."
"Damn, this is really tough."
Ling Yun didn't go inside; he went straight downstairs.