OSDev.org

I think, Symbian is the most advanced mobile OS here. And it is painful to see it dying. Is it possible to fork it and continue development, at least to see it on some "developer" phones and PDAs(i have HP iPAQ 214 running Gentoo Linux), or hand-made hardware, or something else?

Yeah, this idea is somewhat crazy But not impossible, right?

The alternative is pretty much embedded linux, droids included. Now that's a nontailored solution.


In general, comparing an system that has been discarded several years ago to the current top notch isn't fair. Symbian beats windows mobile in sanity and it beats iOS in not having to pay Steve in heaven your monthly income just to be able to write a program for it.

The Symbian kernel is very good and have a lot of features that you would find in any other rich OS such as Linux. Unfortunately, it's the upper layers that suffers. The symbian C++ is very hard to deal with but it could have changed with QT. However, since Microsoft made Nokia their tool that's not going to be developed any further.

We'll see what happens. Joint ventures with Microsoft often tends to be short ones. HTC and Samsung are smart to also use other Mobile OSes like Android and keep Microsoft at a comfortable distance. Microsoft has killed companies before in order to get their patent portfolio for free. This time Microsoft got Nokia's NavTeq software for free which is also hacked so that it works with any WP phone. MS wins and Nokia lose, very synical.

I meant kernel mostly. If i remember well, EKA2 nanokernel(or whatever it is) is the only real-world example, and it must be saved at all costs

The entire stack is not so important, cause Symbian has POSIX compatibility layer, and it is not so hard to port GNU stack, for example.

Actually it does not seem to make any sense running monolithic kernels and *nixes on mobile devices. Things should be kept minimal, an OS like android has whole pile of goop and slows mobiles down extremely. iOS, also has its disadvantages (apart from appstore). The iOS kernel is XNU and still a *nix, however it seems rather redundant using a full blown BSD/Mach blend. Mobile Kernels should be kept small and light. A UNIX system works well for servers, but in today's world where many of these devices use an interpreted system and provide absolutely no access to any UNIX feature (like permissions), it seems more fitting to create a capability based OSes that are micro kernels and extremely light weight and portable. It should have a trigger based service model. Also Mobile OSes should be easily ported and modular. This makes using the OS in new devices easy. As for a fork of Symbian, it might be a good idea to fork the kernel (but not the API and other stuff). The EKA2 has an interesting architecture. What one could do is port it to x86 so it does not fully die out.

I got shocked when i learn that Nokia decides to reduce stack size from 20kb to 8kb in a new version of Symbian from a Symbian programming book several years before.
Pretty advanced mobile OS

ACcurrent wrote:Actually it does not seem to make any sense running monolithic kernels and *nixes on mobile devices. Things should be kept minimal, an OS like android has whole pile of goop and slows mobiles down extremely.

Microkernel systems are neither faster nor smaller than monolithic systems when you take everything into account. They are more modular and (in theory) more reliable. Most of Android's overhead is due to the fact it runs everything on a virtual machine, not because it is based on Linux.

ACcurrent wrote:As for a fork of Symbian, it might be a good idea to fork the kernel (but not the API and other stuff). The EKA2 has an interesting architecture. What one could do is port it to x86 so it does not fully die out.

If i start porting, will you join?

NickJohnson wrote: Microkernel systems are neither faster nor smaller than monolithic systems when you take everything into account.

This is a very controversial question

bazhenovc wrote:

NickJohnson wrote: Microkernel systems are neither faster nor smaller than monolithic systems when you take everything into account.

This is a very controversial question

Actually, not that much. There is nothing in the concept of microkernels that makes systems basing on them inherently faster than monolithic kernels. (I don't say they are inherently slower, but definitely not faster.)

You might have examples for a given microkernel being faster, but that is because it is better designed and implemented than the given monolithic system you are comparing to.

To be fair, neither have monolithic kernels anything conceptually speaking in their favor when it comes to maintainability, or reliability...

I won't judge system size. Looking at how even moderate mobile devices today have RAM in the gigabyte range, I don't see why it should matter.

Agreed, however if comparing EKA and Linux, EKA runs much better on embedded devices. It has better power management, better architecture, and EKA2 is real-time.

Yes I would join!
(only catch: where do I find symbian source code now that they have closed it up)
As for android, yes Dalvik is not the fastest VM, I agree. But using the linux kernel makes things much more messy and modularity and organization are key when creating a mobile OS that is to be used on multiple devices.
Monolithic kernels are faster but if something crashes,everything crashes (major problem with android).
As for the API maybe one could create a new and better tailored API for mobile OSes. (Creating such an API is not hard at all)
The stack size can be returned to its original size in our new fork.

ACcurrent wrote:Creating such an API is not hard at all

Yet everybody knows how to complain about each of S60, UIKit and android interfaces alike... (and that's besides Windows CE that never saw any design, they just abused something existing.)

Combuster wrote:Yet everybody knows how to complain about each of S60, UIKit and android interfaces alike... (and that's besides Windows CE that never saw any design, they just abused something existing.)

Someone has to use it.

Whatever happened to phonegap...

There must be some repo where some one some where cloned the symbian platform. Maybe I should have cloned it instead of the capros tree. I am actually curious about the OS.

Symbian source code lives here

ACcurrent wrote:Yes I would join!

Great! Do you have Jabber or Skype so we can communicate in realtime?

My contacts: Jabber: bazhenovc at gentoo.ru Skype: bazhenovc