Symbian OS Kernel (2010)

https://github.com/SymbianSource/oss.FCL.sf.os.kernelhwsrv

by initramfs • 4 years ago

141 84 4 years ago

github.com

initramfs3• 4 years ago

"Symbian Source Code Final repositories from the defunct Symbian Foundation"

jokowueu• 4 years ago

In my opinion it's the best phone first os .

Tried it a few years ago and it was perfect

Happy it's been opensourced

interesting forks out there as well www.github.com/squaklabs/miraicat-kernel

jillesvangurp2• 4 years ago

I worked at Nokia when management stubbornly kept flogging the dead horse that was Symbian. It didn't work. It just wasn't good enough. Android, even in it's early versions was hardly perfect but still ran circles around Symbian. Android at the time had issues with stability, features, performance, etc. But it was a breath of fresh air compared to Symbian devices which had even more of those type of issues. And of course the iphone redefined what a smart phone should be around the same time.

Nokia actually opensourced it around that time as well. Symbian has been open source for well over a decade. This looks more like the retirement of what remains of that effort, which included the Symbian Foundation. Presumably, by now there are very few; if any, commercial users of Symbian left. So, they are parking the source code at Github for whomever still has some use for it. As you can see from the commit logs, development has been dead since 2010. I seriously doubt that is going to change.

jojobas• 4 years ago

I don't know, Nokia C7 was pretty good in 2011, Android was nowhere near it.

Granted, I never tried developing for it.

Ste_Evans• 4 years ago

Nokia's problem was their UI, which was not controlled by Symbian, not the underlying OS. Hundreds of Symbian-OS based phones were on the market from 2001, including in the Japanese market which had the most testing. The p800 and p910 had a UI similar to iPhone and Android in 2003, 3 years before the iPhone, on 3G networks. The second version of the Symbian OS kernel from 2003 was real time i.e. a comms stack could be run together with the apps off the one CPU. Are the Linux kernel or iOS kernel real time now even?

Android OS and iOS are hacks of desktop OSes so are optimised for performance rather than battery life or memory usage; Symbian OS was designed as a mobile OS from the beginning optimising power and memory management.

It was the timing of Google's IPO which scuppered Symbian. Google were able to spend billions getting Android in place to capture Symbian's market share and customers as iPhone buzz grew the market.

pjmlp• 4 years ago

I was on the Networks business unit during those days, and even today, trying to use Android NDK still makes me miss Symbian C++ despite its warts, it is incredible how Android team has managed to make a mess out of it.

_4482• 4 years ago

Symbian was not in a dictating position as Google or Apple are. Symbian was a complex company structure with major handset manufacturers having their separate agendas. People at Symbian had to walk a very tight rope catering to the demands of everyone. Not an easy task.

js8• 4 years ago

I had Nokia E71 (?) with Symbian, worst phone I had, I replaced that with Palm 650 (not sure I got model numbers right).

The Symbian UI was extremely clunky. I am not sure it even had touch screen. They had whole keyboard, but you had to navigate menus with arrow keys. Why not give user the full power of the keyboard, like Emacs or Vim? Why can't I have menu options on hotkeys?

I think people forgot about how bad phone UIs were before Steve Jobs' heavy focus on UI. And I am no fan of touch-based controls, still want a proper keyboard.

secondcoming6• 4 years ago

Symbian never had a UI. Phone manufacturers were expected to build their own. There were several; Nokia’s Series 60 would be the one most are familiar with. That sucked a lot. Nokia were terrible at software.

There’s probably a business lesson in there somewhere about how your biggest customer can become synonymous with your actual product, and you get ruined by association.

hulitu• 4 years ago

I think people forgot about how bad phone UIs were before Steve Jobs' heavy focus on UI.

And years later they are still terrible. At least Android looks like an interface designed by people who have never seen GUIs before: GUI elements (warning) obscuring other GUI elements with no possibility to move them.

nix23• 4 years ago

What?? The E71 was the best phone i ever had!! I loved that thing until it was "stolen" at dehli airport...

gonzo41• 4 years ago

Hard disagree. I really loved candybar phones. I just wished that Nokia/Microsoft had picked up android for their feature phones. IMO, the best OS is the one that has access to banking applications and lots of vendor support.

mnd999• 4 years ago

There’s no license though, right?

sturza• 4 years ago

What did they use Obj-C for?

aaronbrethorst• 4 years ago

You can click through to view matching files: https://github.com/SymbianSource/oss.FCL.sf.os.kernelhwsrv/s...

In this case, it seems the answer is nothing. It’s just a bug in the GitHub language detection code.

anta40• 4 years ago

So, how can we build this thing? No documentation/README etc

systemvoltage• 4 years ago

You've ever been to a junkyard? If you pick up a broken amplifier, it's not going to have a user manual taped to it. You're going to have to figure things out. This is essentially code junkyard. 13 years old and rusting.

secondcoming6• 4 years ago

You will need to find a development kit somewhere.

The documentation on this random website seems accurate

https://docs.huihoo.com/symbian/nokia-symbian3-developers-li...

initramfs3• 4 years ago

OP Here. Found that there's a previous thread, with more info SDK tools: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31492447

edderly5• 4 years ago

I'd try to build a textshell image, maybe the emulator or the beagleboard https://github.com/SymbianSource/oss.FCL.sf.adapt.beagleboar...

edderly5• 4 years ago

Oh look qemu too https://github.com/SymbianSource/oss.FCL.sf.adapt.Qemu

https://github.com/SymbianSource/oss.FCL.sf.adapt.Qemu/blob/...

kgeist• 4 years ago

I wonder what was the rationale for their formatting rules. No spaces around "=", "==" or "," but there're spaces around "?" and "||".

swinglock• 4 years ago

Are there rules? Nothing is consistent even within single function.

secondcoming6• 4 years ago

There were definitely rules, but as the company grew it seems they were not followed all that strictly.

notRobot• 4 years ago

Over the past decade I've purchased several Chinese cheapo keypad phones, and they all seem to run a very similar java-based OS. Does anyone have any information on what OS that is exactly, and if it's open source?

jpegqs4• 4 years ago

I recently ordered and researched the cheapest feature phones (and some smartwatches), looks like half of that market is occupied by Unisoc with the SC6531(E/DA) chipset (from the Spreadtrum company they bought). It uses Mocor OS. The second half of this market is occupied by Mediatek MT6260/MT6261 chipsets. I wrote tools to run my code on these chipsets.

There are also phones on Mocor5 OS, a little more expensive, it's actually Android 4.4 on the Spreadtrum SC7715 chipset.

I didn't find any Java here, but these CPUs have a Jazelle ARM extension to run Java bytecode.

P.S.: There's an old project based on reverse engineered MT6260 firmware: https://github.com/xobs/fernly

jpegqs4• 4 years ago

I wanted to run Doom on one of them. So far I have LCD control for SC6531E (with 9306 LCD panel), USB control for SC6531E/SC6531DA and USB control for MT6260/MT6261 (using API from bootloader).

I load the code not while the OS is running, but through boot via USB.

SC6531DA is similar to SC6531E, but some constants have been changed, so additional research into its firmware is required.

I have enough knowledge to run some game on the SC6531E, but a lot of work still needs to be done.

Anyone want to cooperate with me?

seba_dos13• 4 years ago

Symbian is not Java-based.

xobs• 4 years ago

It's probably Nucleus, which is what Mediatek uses a lot on their low-end phones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucleus_RTOS

It's not open source per se, but the phones themselves tend to have very little modification from the reference EVK, which means if you can find the BSP you can usually build a firmware image that will work on a device.

jpegqs4• 4 years ago

I don't know if the Mediatek chips have overridable pins, but the Spreadtrum does. There are also different LCD panels that have slightly different interfaces for which you will need to write a driver (and find it from the original firmware). The button mapping also may vary.

So writing firmware that will work on most phones on a particular chipset will not be so easy.

jpegqs4• 4 years ago

From the ones I got, I found MAUI in the name of the firmware, and on Wikipedia I found these notes:

MAUI, a feature-phone operating system used with MediaTek-based shanzhai devices, also used on Motorola phones and some Samsung feature phones.
MediaTek developed an embedded operating system named MAUI Runtime Environment which is based on Nucleus RTOS.

So it's not raw Nucleus.

HeckFeck3• 4 years ago

Nucleus? How's its Weissman score?

dm3192• 4 years ago

When I got my Nokia E90 in 2007ish, it's hard to describe the power and potential in that device. It was multitasking, 3G, GPS, camera, video, email, web, app store etc. The big downfall of these devices was that consumers weren't familiar with the types of mobile contracts, and specifically data. The iphone got it right by only selling the iphone with a data package, whereas people bought these symbian smartphone and later found they couldn't make full use of them. Not to mention back then we had to set up the internet connection ourselves.

I moved onto the N900 when my E90 slipped out my linen trousers in a taxi in Morocco.

thriftwy• 4 years ago

N900 was a mighty beast, I only moved off it when its power port tore away.

Too bad Nokia did not have the focus to stick to one platform (Maemo vs. MeeGo vs. Windows Phone)

seba_dos13• 4 years ago

It took me about a decade to move from N900, and even then it's still handling one of my SIMs.

nikanj• 4 years ago

The software quality was also absolute dogshit. Your phone would ring, you would click on the button to answer, and the phone app would just crash.

It was nice having irc and a good ssh client on my phone, but the phone was simply not stable enough for a daily driver.

dm3192• 4 years ago

That's weird, the E90 was the last phone I had with reliable phone features. The N900 could be buggy, but I've had iphones and pixels since then and I give answering a phone that is ringing in my pocket to be very often a miss, even now. More an issue with a touchscreen I think.

blub• 4 years ago

Didn’t own the E90, but I’ve had several Symbian smartphones and don’t think I’ve ever seen the “phone” app crash. In fact I remember that they were generally stable compared to computers.

Only the browsers would run out of memory and crash, hence why Opera mini (which compressed and slimmed down websites) was so popular at that time.

DrNosferatu3• 4 years ago

Have you ever tried to code any non-trivial application for Symbian / S60?

If you ever did, the business opportunity to build a mobile platform with any sort of half-sane API will immediately scream very loudly at your face - and that's exactly what Apple did with iOS. The rest is History.

A real sad story - the hardware was quite capable for the time.

ChuckNorris892• 4 years ago

The thing is Nokia was not a software first company. It was a phone/electronics company so that's where the decision making was biased. Someone here posted that the Symbian repos were in such a mess that compiling the OS would take over 2 days and nobody in management saw a problem with that.

It's easy now in hindsight to say they could have won the market with a software ecosystem but back then that was not clear for them.

It was clear for Apple since they had the experience monetizing the iTunes ecosystem and they were a software focused company.

DrNosferatu3• 4 years ago

It was very clear then for me!

I had to professionally code an image processing application for Symbian in 2008/9, and that's when I formed this opinion. Apple & Android seemed to agree :)

What's surprising is that there weren't more attempts at a sane mobile platform/API - and earlier.

type0• 4 years ago

Nokia owned TrollTech (Qt), so they had all the chances to become a software company, it baffles me still why they didn't.

jamesdhutton• 4 years ago

Yes. I made a game for S60, in 2004. I agree the SDK and the API were poor. But I think the real mistake they made was failing to build an app store. IIRC I think they might have had some kind of rudimentary app store but it wasn't accessible to mere mortals. The only way I could figure out how to distribute my game was to post it as a freely downloadable file on the web, which I did. I have no idea whether anybody ever downloaded it. If they had just made it easy for developers to distribute their apps then I think history might have been quite different.

secondcoming6• 4 years ago

Nokia had Ovi which was an attempt at an app store.

edderly5• 4 years ago

Does anyone know what license this is under?

npteljes• 4 years ago

They don't state explicitly, so it's basically source-available software, not Open Source (nor Free Software).

https://www.theregister.com/2011/04/06/nokia_confirms_symbia...

jbj• 4 years ago

saved up in high school to buy P1i (sony ericsson) and remember the feeling of being blown away when installing the first third party app, I think a weather app.

pmarreck2• 4 years ago

Brings back memories of hacked N-Gage titles running on my Not-N-Gage-But-Same-Hardware-And-OS Nokia lol

Seriously though I cannot understate what a step it was to go from that to the first iPhone

pmarreck2• 4 years ago

crap, I meant "overstate"

zokier2• 4 years ago

What is surprising is that Symbian did not manage to pivot to embedded market in any way, to compete with VxWorks and its likes. It was a fairly advanced RTOS at it's heart afterall, and proven to work well on ARM platforms.

miohtama• 4 years ago

Symbian started as an embedded platform “OS for toasters.” It was independent, used by mobile phone manufacturers like Sony, Ericsson, others. It was also used in non-mobile phone applications.

Nokia bought the whole Symbian in-house in attempt to compete against Android and iOS. Others non-Apple brands had already switched to Android in this point.

Steven Elop joined Nokia had a had management bonus incentives to sell the Nokia Mobile Phones (not Networks) to Microsoft. Which he did.

It was good for Nokia shareholders. Few years later Microsoft had screwed up things even worse and wrote Nokia purchase value from $7B to zero.

In this point, Symbian was buried long ago. Microsoft had never incentive to spin it out or make it a success story. Their only goal was Windows dominance.

zokier2• 4 years ago

Symbian started as an embedded platform “OS for toasters.”

Nope. Symbian started as an initiative to get Psions palmtop OS to cellphones; larger embedded market was never a consideration.

borissk• 4 years ago

I see why it was so slow - there are DELAYs sprinkled everywhere.

dancemethis• 4 years ago

The best thing about Symbian is that "it was never actually Symbian, it's S60 or whatever".

HeckFeck3• 4 years ago

Interesting source dump. I see a lot of utility scripts written in Perl; they even have the documentation as well-formatted POD.

I wonder if there are any references to its progenitor the PSION. A cursory glance revealed none, at least not in the copyright headers.

mananaysiempre• 4 years ago

The e32 prefix used in the source is for EPOC32, Symbian’s original name, so you can count that as a reference. But books about Symbian say it was a complete rewrite of the original 16-bit, C-language EPOC, there probably isn’t any code that comes from there verbatim.

(The Psion was the brand of computers, the EPOC was the OS.)

HeckFeck3• 4 years ago

Ah, I knew they were related but I wasn't sure of the precise nature of the relationship. Thanks for gratifying my curiosity.

thunkshift1• 4 years ago

How to begin to start understanding a codebase like this? Where does one start

_4482• 4 years ago

Depends on your interest. It is an operating system, so has lot of different parts. It is a microkernel with other parts as servers e.g for graphics there is window server, for filesystem there is file server etc.

Start from the server for the area you are interested in and then move down to the related drivers and finally the kernel. You will need to understand some of the design patterns used in Symbian though, which are bit unique.

fork-bomber• 4 years ago

In an attempt to learn more, I accidentally misspelt Symbian as Sybian on Google search. The world truly is er wondrous. Cough.

chronomex• 4 years ago

another copy, in the original Mercurial, and with mediawiki dumps too: https://archive.org/details/SymbianOpenSource

Symbian OS Kernel (2010)

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