I will limit my comments to a description and assesment of Aperios, and some of Sony's motives..
Aperios has been around at Sony for atleast the last 4 years, and continues to be under development. They are now using it in the prototypes of a few items, the most visible being their "Pet Robot" and Set Top Box designs, including one that is part of the Sony/GI deal.
Aperios appears to be directed at addressing Microsoft's OS dominance.Sony seems to be in a constant love/hate relationship with Microsoft,
On one hand, their development of Aperios (and their participation in DVL, Digital Video Labs, a lab chartered with designing future Digital TV and such media platforms, and their investment in General Instrument) is a means to deflect any reliance on MS for system software in the Consumer space.
On the other hand they have the WebTV relationship, and also need Microsoft's help in pushing things like Memory Stick, 1394, and HAVI as standards.
For the "Pet Robot", they are proposing to have a framework, called "Open-R" which will dictate the hardware and software interfaces to make the Robot into a open, scalable, plug'n'play type of platform. The Open-R framework uses Aperios APIs for software.
Some information on this project, and some quicktime clips of the robot in action are available at: sony.co.jp
Now, back to Aperios. It appears that the predominant push for Aperios is to be an object oriented architecture, i.e. a very modular approach to system software. Sony's strategy seems to be that they need to rely an a large 3rd party development community, and they want the ability for applications to dynamically load, unload, and reload modules of software.
They want the OS to be realtime. This seems to be an area that has caused them some trouble.
They also want APERIOS to have good tools. Their choice for tools is with Green Hills software. There does seem to be some strife about this at Sony, in that a push exists for using GNU. The reason here, of course, is that GNU is free, whereas GreenHills costs money. Sony wants to seed a large 3rd party community, and cheap/free tools helps this immensely.
Aperios doesn't have networking (yet). There is an internal effort, I think its called M-Net, which lays a foundation for protocols to be implemented on top of Aprios. TCP/IP and ATM are the first ones.
Aperios ignores Java. I have not come accross any reference to an effort to implement Java VM on top of Aperios. It would be interesting to know is Sony and Sun have had any such discussions.
Aperios is currently running on the MIPS cpu architecture. I have heard of an effort to port to the ARM chip, though this may be completely rumour only.
It would be interesting to know if the Playstation 2 uses Aperios, or any part of the Aperios spec. Playstation and V2 use MIPS chips.
My personal call on Aperios:
It seems incomplete, and the tools story is not clean. The lack of networking makes it a "limited use" OS, and the only chip it runs on is MIPS.
As a in-house R&D hobby, it may be fine. As a viable, robust, open, and complete OS architecture, it still has a lot of catching up to do.
JMHO
chinacat
ps Appreciate any comments, or any additional info, if any one comes accross any. |
