kernel

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 38 Comments on AMLogic Releases AML8726-MX Linux 3.0.8 Source Code

AMLogic Releases AML8726-MX Linux 3.0.8 Source Code

While doing a Google search to locate the open Linux page of AMLogic, I noticed another link reading “Amlogic AML8726-MX Linux kernel code released“. Interesting. So AMLogic appears to have released the kernel source code for their latest dual core Cortex A9 processor at the beginning of August and the tarball is available from their open source site:  kernel-common-2012-08-03-git-a63244fb9c.tar.gz. A github user (fards) also imported the code to github, but he’s not affiliated with AMLogic, so don’t expect commits from AMLogic there. Let’s retrieve it:

AML8726-MX is codenamed MESON6 in the source code, and the code is in arch/arm/mach-meson6/, but let’s see if we can find a config file in arch/arm/configs. Yes! There are 4: meson6_android_defconfig – Android config file (Single core) meson6_defconfig – Linux config file (Single core) all Android config disabled. meson6smp_android_defconfig – Android config file with smp (symmetric multiprocessing) support meson6smp_defconfig – Config file with smp […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments on 15 Linaro OnAir Sessions about Android, Linux, Debugging and Software QA

15 Linaro OnAir Sessions about Android, Linux, Debugging and Software QA

Linaro has planned 15 virtual conferences between Monday, August 13 and Saturday, August 18, 2012. Those online events will deal with the work done at Linaro, including software optimization, software QA, Android and Linux kernel development, Open Embedded on ARMv8 and more. Those conferences are public and anybody can join. All times indicated below are GMT+07:00 (Bangkok), so you can either mentally convert the time (recommended), or click on the links below to get the date and time in your timezone. Exploring The Performance Impact of PGO and LTO on ARM– Mon, August 13, 5:00 PM Abstract: Profile guided and linked time optimisation (PGO and LTO) are two of GCC’s cross program optimisations that should improve both the startup and runtime of typical programs.  We know that they basically work on ARM but don’t know the potential speed up or the work involved in proper support. This session will cover […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments on Linaro 12.07 Release with Kernel 3.5 and Android 4.0.4

Linaro 12.07 Release with Kernel 3.5 and Android 4.0.4

Linaro has released version 12.07 based on Linux Kernel 3.5-rc3 and Android 4.0.4. Some work has been done on Jelly Bean (but the port is for next month), several benchmark tools have been added to LAVA as Linaro wants to provide standard benchmarks for Android, Linaro ALIP image now uses LXDE by default with a smaller image and improved performance, and Open Embedded images are now available (minimal and LAMP stack). Here are the highlights of the release: Android Jellybean baselines for Galaxy and Panda with Linaro extra’s available Android Benchmarking apps were deployed for pandaboard, snowball and origen in LAVA including: vellamo, quadrant, nbench, linpack, glbenchmark, geekbench, caffeinemark, antutu, andebench Improved native Benchmarks variance on Android to 1%, working on Java variance ICS “tests” builds now produced by default and test lists generated Open overlay tarballs working pm-qa’s cpuidle cpufreq cpuhotplug sched_mc suspend integrated into the Android builds Linaro […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 8 Comments on VIA Releases Kernel 2.6.32 and U-Boot Source Code for $49 APC Board

VIA Releases Kernel 2.6.32 and U-Boot Source Code for $49 APC Board

VIA Technology unveiled the low cost APC (Android PC) board based on WonderMedia WM8750 processor (ARM11) back in May, and started to ship the Android board this month (I think since that was their plan). The company has just released Kernel 2.6.32.9 and U-Boot source on github. Here’s how to retrieve the code provided git is already installed on your machine:

You can then build U-Boot (provided you’ve already installed an ARM toolchain in your path):

and the Linux kernel:

The availability of the source means we should see Linux distribution like Debian, Fedora or Arch Linux ARM (separate from Arch Linux) running on the board very soon. In theory, it’s also possible to run a Linux distribution with the binary Linux kernel compiled for Android, but it causes some issues and also makes customization more difficult. I think they should also have release the code they modified […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments on LinuxCon North America 2012 Schedule

LinuxCon North America 2012 Schedule

LinuxCon (North America) 2012 will take place on August 29 – 31, 2012 at Sheraton Hotel & Marina, in San Diego, California. The event will be co-located with the Linux Kernel Summit, the Linux Plumbers Conference, and CloudOpen 2012. LinuxCon consists of 3 days of keynotes, business and developers related sessions as well as tutorials. There will be over 80 sessions and keynotes during those 3 days. I’ll highlight a few sessions that I find particularly interesting and related to embedded Linux, software development and ARM. August 29 10:45 – 11:30 – Life After BerkeleyDB: OpenLDAP’s Memory-Mapped Database by Howard Chu, Symas Abstract: OpenLDAP’s new MDB library is a highly optimized B+tree implementation that is orders of magnitude faster and more efficient than everything else in the software world. Reads scale perfectly linearly across arbitrarily many CPUs with no bottlenecks, and data is returned with zero memcpy’s. Writes are on […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments on Linux 3.5 Release

Linux 3.5 Release

Linus Torvalds has announced the release of Linux Kernel 3.5: Subject: Linux 3.5 released Ok, not a lot happened since -rc7. There’s a number of MIPS commits (for some reason MIPS has had a horrible track record with the -rc time schedule, I suspect I should just stop pulling late in the game), but most of the rest is pretty small. A couple of dm/md fixes, some gma500 work, make kgdb ‘dmesg’ command work again, some networking fixes, some xfs and cifs noise, yadda yadda. About 50% of the patch is actually the SPEAr clock name renaming that is just some search-and-replace. … Linux 3.4 brought updates to Btrfs file system, some new Intel, AMD and NVidia GPU drivers, X32 ABI, perf tool improvements and support for Yama security module and QNX6 file system. Linux 3.5 brings the following key changes: ext4 metadata checksums:  Ext4 has added the ability to […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 41 Comments on Nightly Builds for AllWinner A10 U-boot, Linux Kernel and Hardware Packs

Nightly Builds for AllWinner A10 U-boot, Linux Kernel and Hardware Packs

Kent of SCUZ Technologies has graciously provided a build machine (Intel Xeon E5645) for Rhombus Tech (and possibly other) open source projects, and I’ve setup nightly build scripts for AllWinner A10 kernel, bootloader (u-boot) and hardware packs for Mele A1000 (HDMI), Mele A1000 (VGA), A10 mini PCs (using MK802 script.bin) as well as a server build for Mele A1000. The nightlies are built using  a10-hwpack-bld.sh script which is available in github, and can be downloaded from http://dl.linux-sunxi.org/nightly/ The resulting files are copied to a dropbox folder, until a better solution is found. For each build, you’ll find the following files : u-boot.bin – U-boot sun4i-spl.bin – U-boot SPL uImage – Kernel image product_YYYY.MM.DD.log (e.g. mele-a1000_2012.07.20.log) – The build logs whether the build succeeds of fails. One per hardware pack. product_hwpack_YYY.MM.DD.log ( e.g. mele-a1000_hwpack_2012.07.20.7z) – The hardware pack with the kernel, u-boot which can be used with a1x-media-create.sh script to create […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 24 Comments on Building the Linux Kernel 3.0.8 For Telechips TCC8925 mini PCs (CX-01, Z900, TizzBird N1…)

Building the Linux Kernel 3.0.8 For Telechips TCC8925 mini PCs (CX-01, Z900, TizzBird N1…)

Yesterday, we got Linux kernel 3.0.8 source code from Telechips, as well as some files related to Android 4.0 (Webkit + OMX). Today, I’ve had a look at the kernel source code and found a few very interesting things. First let’s get the code from github:

Good news! The code for the latest Telechips TCC892X is present in arch/arm/mach-tcc892x, and there is support for 3 types of boards: board-m805_892x – TCC8923 M805 board board-tcc8920 – TCC8920 evaluation board board-tcc8920st – TCC8920 STB evaluation board TCC8920 STB evaluation board appears to be relevant to products such as Diyomate A6, but if it’s also used for TCC8925 HDMI Dongle such as CX-01 mini PC, Zero Devices Z900 or ValuePlus TizzBird N1. Now let’s have a look at the default config directory for arm (arch/arm/configs):

Nice! tcc8925st_dongle_defconfig and tcc8925st_donglehs_defconfig look particularly interesting! A quick comparison shows that the only difference is […]