MESSAGE
| DATE | 2014-05-06 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
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| SUBJECT | Subject: [NYLXS - HANGOUT] weos lives
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https://www.linux.com/news/featured-blogs/200-libby-clark/770651-how-lg-took-webos-from-mobile-phones-to-tvs-in-under-a-year
When LG acquired the WebOS project from HP early last year, it was a
stripped down Linux-based mobile operating system hardly fit to run on
any hardware. Then in January, less than a year later, LG debuted its
new WebOS smart TVs at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. And
until the first WebOS TVs hit retail shelves earlier this month the team
was working around the clock for the release.
“It's been a roller coaster year for us,” said Steve Winston,
LG's WebOS project lead. “We have taken the stripped down OS and
turned it back into a fully fledged embedded operating system for a
TV.”
To accomplish this transformation, the development team had to back port
most of the components from LG's first-generation smart TVs, built on
their own Linux-based OS called Netcast, onto the WebOS platform. LG's
proprietary TV stacks and loads of additional components for supporting
streaming media and interconnectivity to other devices, for example,
needed to learn how to “speak WebOS,” Winston said.
So they set out to convert all of the necessary LG components to the
OpenEmbedded environment – the open source software framework used
to build the original WebOS project. Now the core technology behind the
Yocto Project, OpenEmbedded is a set of recipes, classes and associated
files tailored for building a Linux distribution for embedded devices.
OpenEmbedded ensures that all the parts that end up on the final
hardware are very well contained, Winston explained. In other build
environments the machine you build on really determines what you end up
building, he said.
“We wanted a fully predictable and reproducible build
environment,” Winston said. “So that at any time in the future
we can go back and do the same build and get the same results.”
Creating a Standard Build Environment
In the process, they ended up building a customized Yocto Project/
OpenEmbedded environment in order to simplify the metadata and abstract
standard build instructions. Component owners can inherit that
information instead of relying on binary drops to the other build teams,
which allows easy sharing and component integration.
It was difficult at first to train LG's small army of engineers, who
were contributing those components from teams and branches across Korea,
the U.S. and Europe. They were accustomed to working in basic make files
under the former proprietary build system, rather than the metadata and
layers standard in OpenEmbedded.
“It's a new and different concept and that learning curve can be
frustrating,” Winston said. “We even had some pushback but were
able to convince them it was the way to go.”
After the initial pain of switching, they're reaping the benefits of
having a standard build environment used across all of LG's engineering
teams. After several months, and many lessons learned, they have a set
of plug and play components that all connect via the WebOS luna service
bus, Winston said.
More open source WebOS components to come
Now that the initial WebOS TV release is done, the team can again focus
on adding new features to the platform. They also plan to go back over
their work from the previous year and decide which new WebOS components
must stay proprietary and which they can release as open source,
starting with their recently released Enyo application development
framework for TV called Moonstone.
“The core of the operating system is out there on Github, including
the luna-service2 and core JSON library, which works together with OS/2
to be a fundamental part of everything that's WebOS,” Winston said.
They're also planning to work with the Yocto Project community in the
future to share some of what they've learned about setting up
international engineering teams, as well as to help integrate their
custom changes into future releases.
“We love Linux. When you look at the list of core technologies,
WebOS is built on we definitely owe a debt of gratitude to the open
source and Linux community,” Winston said. “We leveraged the
great work other people have done to put together this operating
system.”
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