LinuxCon North America 2013 Schedule

LinuxCon (North America) 2013 will take place on September 16 – 18, 2013 in New Orleans, LA. The event will be co-located with several other conferences: the Linux Plumbers Conference, the Xen Project User Summit, the OpenDaylight Mini-Summit, the Gluster Workshop 2013, the UEFI Plugfest, the Linux Wireless Summit, the Linux Security Summit, and CloudOpen 2013. LinuxCon consists of 3 days of keynotes, and legal, operations, and developers related sessions as well as tutorials and workshops. There will be around 150 sessions and keynotes during those 3 days. I’ve gone through developer sessions and selected one for each time period. Monday, September 16 10:35 – 11:25 – UEFI and Linux by Kirk Bresniker, HP UEFI has become ubiquitous on the PC client systems and is coming up on servers and ARM-based systems, it is becoming the converged firmware infrastructure. UEFI Secure Boot feature has attracted a lot of attention from […]

Linaro 13.07 Release With Linux Kernel 3.10.1 and Android 4.2.2

Linaro 13.07 has been released with Linux Kernel 3.10.1 (both baseline and stable versions), and Android 4.2.2. It’s summer time, so activity seems to have slowdown a bit, yet improvements have done to LAVA with the first LAVA Multi-purpose Prove (LMP) setup, and Linaro has released build with Linux 3.10.1, Ubuntu Raring, OpenEmbedded (ARMv8), and Android. For the very first time, there’s even an Android 4.2.2 community build for HiSilicon K3V2 hardware (HiSilicon Hi4511 development platform). Here are the highlights of this release: LAVA LAVA Core VExpress A9 test images no longer use the master image’s boot loader Support added for interactive bootloader commands. Support for OpenID / Crowd added for LAVA. LAVA Master images updated on images.validation.linaro.org LAVA Multi-node – Multi-Node support has an initial implementation which can support communication between nodes under test via the use of a GroupDispatcher. LAVA Lab Capabilities – LMP (LAVA Multi-purpose Probe) prototypes […]

Linaro 13.05 Release With Linux Kernel 3.10, Android 4.2.2, and Ubuntu Raring Ringtail

Linaro 13.05 has just been released with Linux Kernel 3.10-rc2 and Android 4.2.2. This is the first release with Ubuntu 13.04 (Raring Ringtail) images. There’s also Linux Linaro Stable (LSK) preview based on kernel 3.9.4. BeagleBone Black support has been added and preliminary hwpack and images are available, an Android Arndale image with virtual framebuffer is also available. You can now get a desktop environment (XFCE) on Aarch64 / ARMv8. Hardware packs with Real-time Linux kernel (PREEMPT_RT) can be downloaded for Pandaboard and Arndale. More work has gone into Aarch64, big.LITTLE HMP, and ARM virtualization (KVM). Finally an UEFI is available not only for Vexpress boards, but also Samsung Origen and Arndale boards, as well as Texas Instruments Pandabord and Beagleboard. Here are the highlights of this release: LAVA First prototype production run of LAVA Lmp completed, tested functional. Beaglebone Black is now running in LAVA. TC2s is now running […]

Linaro 13.04 Release With Linux Kernel 3.9 and Android 4.2.2

Linaro 13.04 has just been released. It features Linux Kernel 3.9-rc7 and Android 4.2.2. A lot of work has been done on ARMv8 (Cortex A53) with further work on OpenEmbedded, more testing, and updates to the GCC toolchain. Calxeda EnergyCore server has been added to LAVA, Origen Quad now gets hardware video acceleration in Android Jelly Bean. Still more cleanup has been done on the kernel side with regards to Samsung and ST SoC, and a big.LITTLE porting guide is now available (linaro login required). Here are the highlights of this release: LAVA Prototype of a new publishing system is used to overcome performance problems with android-build.linaro.org. Calxeda EnergyCore support is merged in LAVA, and an isolated system has been set up for web benchmarking. Fedora support is merged in LAVA. A user can submit LAVA jobs using a Fedora pre-built image. Boot commands are untangled from LAVA dispatcher. They’re now […]

BoFs: Developer Tools and Methods: Tips & Tricks – ELCE 2012

Tim Bird, senior staff software engineer at Sony Network Entertainment, hosts a BoF session about tools & methods for embedded Linux developers at ELCE 2012. Abstract: In this Birds-of-a-Feather-session, Tim will share some of his favorite tips for developing embedded Linux software. This will include tips for using ‘git’, how he does multi-platform development, and tips for other tools that other developers might find useful. Prior to the event, Tim will do a survey and solicit ideas from other developers as well. Please come to this BoF prepared to share your own productivity tips for embedded Linux development. Tim talks is divided into the following key points: Git tips – How to finds info about commits (git log, git show), use aliases (e.g. for colored output), find a commit that caused problem (git bisect), and more Patch management – quilt patch managing tool, diffinfo, and splitpatch (to break patches apart) […]

OpenOCD: Hardware Debugging and More – ELCE 2012

Peter Stuge, self-employed hardware, software and security consultant, talks about OpenOCD open source tool for JTAG debugging at ELCE 2012 in Barcelona. Abstract: The presentation walks through how to use the OpenOCD open source software to debug embedded systems on the hardware level via JTAG interface, allowing single stepping, setting breakpoints, inspecting register and memory contents and more, starting before the CPU even executes the first instruction. After an introduction to JTAG debugging we look at how to use OpenOCD both standalone for firmware flashing as well as together with the GDB GNU Debugger for convenient debugging of bootloaders or the Linux kernel. These tasks will be demonstrated, and the respective OpenOCD configuration details will be explained.The presentation targets intermediate-level developers who work on bootloaders, BSPs and kernel drivers, deeply embedded systems, and test and production engineers with an interest in using OpenOCD, which can allow unified tooling across all […]

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 […]

ARM Development Studio 5 (DS 5) Demos At Design West

ARM has shot a few video demos of their ARM Development Studio 5 (DS 5), a software development tool suite for ARM platforms, at Design West 2012. The first video shows DS 5 running on the Xilinx Zynq-7000 platform (dual cortex A9 + FPGA), and we can see the memory map, registers, call graphs and stack usage. We can also see real-time processor switching and the function that takes the most CPU resources (profiling). The second videos showcases ARM DS-5 Streamline, a performance analyzer, which helps determine how well programs are running on a Linux or Android platform, on an Samsung Exynos 4210 platform (Origen board?). This tool also to profile both the dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 and ARM Mali-400 MP GPU in the platform. We are shown three types of reports: CPU/GPU Loading Threads usage Power Usage per application The third and last video shows ARM DS 5 on Freescale i.MX6 […]