The release of the open platform webOS Open Source Edition 2.14 has been published, which can be used on various portable devices, boards and car infotainment systems. Raspberry Pi 4 boards are considered as the reference hardware platform. The platform is developed in a public repository under the Apache 2.0 license, and development is curated by the community, adhering to a collaborative development management model.
The webOS platform was originally developed by Palm in 2008 and used on the Palm Pre and Pixie smartphones. In 2020, after the acquisition of Palm, the platform passed into the hands of Hewlett-Packard, after which HP tried to use this platform in its printers, tablets, laptops and PCs. In 2012, HP announced the transfer of webOS to an independent open source project and in 2013 began opening the source code of its components. The platform was acquired from Hewlett-Packard by LG in 2013 and is now used on more than 70 million LG TVs and consumer devices. In 2018, the webOS Open Source Edition project was founded, through which LG tried to return to the open development model, attract other participants and expand the range of devices supported in webOS.
The webOS system environment is formed using the OpenEmbedded toolkit and base packages, as well as the build system and metadata set from the Yocto project. The key components of webOS are the system and application manager (SAM, System and Application Manager), which is responsible for running applications and services, and the Luna Surface Manager (LSM), which forms the user interface. The components are written using the Qt framework and the Chromium browser engine.
Rendering is done through a composite manager that uses the Wayland protocol. To develop custom applications, it is proposed to use web technologies (CSS, HTML5 and JavaScript) and the Enact framework based on React, but it is also possible to create programs in C and C ++ with an interface based on Qt. The user interface and embedded graphical applications are mostly implemented as native programs written using QML technology. By default, the Home Launcher is offered, which is optimized for touch screen operation and offers the concept of successive maps (instead of windows).
To store data in a structured form using the JSON format, DB8 storage is used, which uses the LevelDB database as a backend. For initialization, bootd based on systemd is used. uMediaServer and Media Display Controller (MDC) subsystems are offered for processing multimedia content, PulseAudio is used as a sound server. To automatically update the firmware, OSTree and atomic partition replacement are used (two system partitions are created, one of which is active, and the second is used to copy the update).
Main changes in the new release:
- The default sample applications include a camera application. The program provides basic functionality for taking photos and recording videos, and can be used as a basis for developing more advanced camera applications.
- The transition to the formation of 64-bit assemblies has been made, including assemblies for the Raspberry Pi 4 board (rpi4-64) and the emulator (qemux86). Support for 32 builds has been deprecated.
- An add-on for the open-source Visual Studio Code editor has been proposed that simplifies the development of webOS-specific web applications, Enact applications, and JavaScript services.
- The systemd-oomd low-memory early response service has been activated, which allows you to detect the onset of delays due to lack of resources and selectively shut down resource-intensive processes at a stage when the system is not yet in a critical state and does not begin to intensively trim the cache and force out data in swap partition.
- Network Manager launched the wpa-supplicant service in builds for Raspberry Pi 4 boards.
- The executable files occlientbasicops and ocserverbasicops have been added to the assembly for the emulator, the udev rules for the LGE UWB module have been updated.
- Improved audio recording functionality in the g-camera-pipeline component.
- The browser engine has been updated to Chromium 91.
- Yocto Embedded Linux Platform components have been updated to release 3.1.
- The Memory Manager implements D-Bus signal processing.
Additionally, the OpenLGTV project can be noted, within the framework of which work is underway on reverse engineering firmware for LG TVs in order to expand their functionality, eliminate errors and verify compliance with copyleft licenses when using open components in firmware (partially open firmware). The project develops the epk2extract toolkit for extracting and decrypting firmware and various data from LG, Hisense, Sharp, Philips/TPV and Thompson TVs, as well as a webOS Brew package repository and a TV rooting toolkit (RootMyTV). The project provides assembly environments for creating system images for TVs based on LG NC4 and LG115x boards, and old modified firmware for Saturn S6, Saturn S7 and LG 2010 and 2011 TVs based on Broadcom chips.
Source: opennet.ru