Mathieulh’s update on Utopia: project goes public soon

A hefty update post has been put up by Mathieulh on the Utopia kernel project and it was noted that it’ll be released for everyone soon. For those of you unfamiliar with it, this is a new kernel designed for homebrew and it’ll be used in future custom firmwares. See the details after the jump.

Thanks to Mark M for the tip!

QJ.NET reader Mark M gave us a heads-up on a hot update posted earlier by Mathieulh over at the Lan.st forums. The Utopia kernel seems to be closing in on a release and it’ll be just a matter of time before the public finally sees what it can do.

These are the main points in Mathieulh’s Utopia post as he detailed what he and Silverspring have decided so far:

• The utopia official forums will be hosted among the lan.st forums.
• The public release of utopia has been decided and will take effect as soon as I find time to setup the svn and forum sections.
• Despite the project going public, the project is not done yet, thus you cannot (yet) compile a whole kernel from the soon to be supplied sources. We are looking forward seeing people contributing to complete the utopia project.
• What we do not know about yet is if utopia will use GPL license or BSD but it is likely to be BSD.
• The svn will be readable by everyone but only a few trusted people will be able to update it (so people do not start messing up with the svn by deleting changes or adding irrelevant ones). If you want to contribute to the utopia project you will have to send your code to the forums where it will be added by the staff to the svn later. People who often contribute to utopia will be granted write access to the svn as well.

If you’re not familiar on what exactly Utopia does, it’s to be an open source PSP kernel designed specifically for homebrew and development. It’s going to use up over 1MB of RAM, perhaps 2MB at most. It’s going to be fully documented and divided into two parts: one for developers (who need debugging tools, SDK) and one for homebrewers who want to run software on their PSP designed with it.

“Once completed and stable the utopia kernel is to be implemented as a new operative mode in future custom firmwares,” posts Mathieulh.

Lastly, here’s what Utopia can and can’t do, according to Mathieulh:

• Utopia is not meant to run Sony‘s code, thus current homebrews or games wont run on it.
• Utopia will not feature UMD drive support of any kind.
• Utopia will not feature any kind of DRM functionalities (at least this is not planned)
• Utopia will most likely not feature any kirk engine support.
• Wlan is planned but not a priority at this point.
• No vsh or graphic interface of any kind is to be included in utopia or officially supported by the utopia project. Utopia is ONLY the kernel,
  if you want to code your own shell on top of it, feel free to do so.
• The utopia kernel is NOT based on Linux, freebsd or any other open source project (unlike uClinux for exemple) , it is based on the 3.71 IPL reverse engineering. (and later on existing kernel modules reverse)

Thanks to Mark M for the tip!

Via Lan.st