Sidekick LX 2009 / Blade Will Run NetBSD

* GEEK ALERT *

Wow, here’s a nice shift. Remember all those concerns you guys had about Microsoft switching the Sidekick to *cringe* Windows CE? Well worry no more. The next Sidekick will run the free open source NetBSD operating system. Yes, you read that right. Don’t worry, you won’t have to know how to use the command line to make a phone call, your Sidekick LX 2009 will have the same old Danger User Interface we all know and love.

How do we know this?

- We’ve confirmed this via sources that wish to remain anonymous, but we know that’s not good enough for you guys….

- A job posting (also posted here) looking for “a talented NetBSD software developer interested in helping Danger (a subsidiary of Microsoft) ship the next generation of Danger’s Sidekick platform.” (full text of job description below)

Location: Redmond, WA
Client: Microsoft.
Job Description:

Seeking a talented NetBSD software developer interested in helping Danger (a subsidiary of Microsoft) ship the next generation of Danger’s Sidekick platform. Specifically, we’re looking for NetBSD developers interested in commercializing the NetBSD platform for an embedded mobile computing device, focusing on performance and optimization, bug fixing, and integration with Danger’s higher-level platform code, with an emphasis on kernel and driver support.
Qualifications:
- 8+ years of software development experience
- 8+ years experience with C
- Strong understanding of OS concepts (particularly with NetBSD) such as multi-threaded program design and synchronization, processes & memory protection, etc.
- Strong communication skills
- Strong understanding of the NetBSD/GNU software development process and embedded development & debugging techniques
- Deep understanding of NetBSD, including timers, RPC, TCP/IP, etc.
- Experience with ARM processors highly desirable

- A post on a NetBSD mailing list from a Danger employee saying “that Danger is actively and openly working on NetBSD”. Full post:

Subject: Arm support for TI SDP2430, ARM 1136, ARMv6 and ARM VIPT cache
To: None From: Martin Fouts
List: port-arm
Date: 09/25/2007 12:46:40

I’ve just attempted to send-pr a patch that adds support to release-4 for the TI SDP2430 evaluation board, the ARM 1136 processor core, ARM V6 cache support and VIPT support for ARM.

The work represents the effort of Matt Thomas and Cliff Neighbors of 3AM Software Foundry for Danger, Inc. as well the efforts of many people at Danger, including Marty Fouts, Todd Poynor, Ken Sumrall and others. It builds on the previous OMAP port to NetBSD submitted by “Picovex” containing the port to OMAP by Scott Anderson and others at Danger.

Matt Thomas is currently committing the changes to the matt-armv6 branch.

The port is reasonably stable: It has self-hosted on an NFS mounted file system on the SDP2430 board.

Now that Danger is actively and openly working on NetBSD, we will be making some of our other drivers and ports available to the community as they become stable.

- There’s also this post about porting yaffs (Yet Another Flash File System) to the NetBSD/Sidekick.

’nuff said.