Category: Allwinner A-Series

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 6 Comments on FOSDEM 2023 schedule – Open-source Embedded, Mobile, IoT, Arm, RISC-V, etc… projects

FOSDEM 2023 schedule – Open-source Embedded, Mobile, IoT, Arm, RISC-V, etc… projects

FOSDEM 2023

After two years of taking place exclusively online, FOSDEM 2023 is back in Brussels, Belgium with thousands expected to attend the 2023 version of the “Free and Open Source Developers’ European Meeting” both onsite and online. FOSDEM 2023 will take place on February 4-5 with 776 speakers, 762 events, and 63 tracks. As usual, I’ve made my own little virtual schedule below mostly with sessions from the Embedded, Mobile and Automotive devroom, but also other devrooms including “Open Media”, “FOSS Educational Programming Languages devroom”, “RISC-V”, and others. FOSDEM Day 1 – Saturday February 4, 2023 10:30 – 10:55 – GStreamer State of the Union 2023 by Olivier Crête GStreamer is a popular multimedia framework making it possible to create a large variety of applications dealing with audio and video. Since the last FOSDEM, it has received a lot of new features: its RTP & WebRTC stack has greatly improved, Rust […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 6 Comments on Linux 6.1 LTS release – Main changes, Arm, RISC-V and MIPS architectures

Linux 6.1 LTS release – Main changes, Arm, RISC-V and MIPS architectures

Linux 6.1 LTS

Linus Torvalds announced the release of Linux 6.1, likely to be an LTS kernel, last Sunday: So here we are, a week late, but last week was nice and slow, and I’m much happier about the state of 6.1 than I was a couple of weeks ago when things didn’t seem to be slowing down. Of course, that means that now we have the merge window from hell, just before the holidays, with me having some pre-holiday travel coming up too. So while delaying things for a week was the right thing to do, it does make the timing for the 6.2 merge window awkward. That said, I’m happy to report that people seem to have taken that to heart, and I already have two dozen pull requests pending for tomorrow in my inbox. And hopefully I’ll get another batch overnight, so that I can try to really get as […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments on Linux 6.0 release – Main changes, Arm, RISC-V, and MIPS architectures

Linux 6.0 release – Main changes, Arm, RISC-V, and MIPS architectures

Linux 6.0 Release

Linux 6.0 has just been released by Linus Torvalds: So, as is hopefully clear to everybody, the major version number change is more about me running out of fingers and toes than it is about any big fundamental changes. But of course there’s a lot of various changes in 6.0 – we’ve got over 15k non-merge commits in there in total, after all, and as such 6.0 is one of the bigger releases at least in numbers of commits in a while. The shortlog of changes below is only the last week since 6.0-rc7. A little bit of everything, although the diffstat is dominated by drm (mostly amd new chip support) and networking drivers. And this obviously means that tomorrow I’ll open the merge window for 6.1. Which – unlike 6.0 – has a number of fairly core new things lined up. But for now, please do give this most […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment on Banana Pi BPI-M2 Ultra SBC is now offered with Allwinner A40i industrial-grade processor

Banana Pi BPI-M2 Ultra SBC is now offered with Allwinner A40i industrial-grade processor

Banana BPI-M2 Ultra Allwinner A40i SBC

The Allwinner A40i and A60i industrial-grade quad-core and hexa-core Cortex-A7 processors were first introduced in 2018 with support for the wide -40°C to +85°C industrial temperature range, but so far I had not noticed any hardware making use of either processor. But Banana Pi is now offering the Banana Pi BPI-M2 Ultra SBC, which they launched in 2016 with the Allwinner R40 quad-core Cortex-A7 SoC, with the pin-to-pin and software-compatible Allwinner A40i industrial-grade processor. Banana Pi BPI-M2 Ultra specifications: SoC – Allwinner A40i quad-core Arm Cortex-A7 processor with Arm Mali-400MP2 GPU @ 500 MHz, 1080p60 H.264, MPEG-4, MPEG-1/2 video decoder, H.264 1080p45 video encoder System Memory – 2GB DDR3 SDRAM Storage – 8GB eMMC flash, SATA interface, microSD card slot Video Output HDMI 1.4 port up to 1080p60 4-lane MIPI DSI display connector, or RGB, or LVDS Audio I/O – 3.5mm headphone jack, digital audio output via HDMI, built-in microphone […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 9 Comments on OpenWrt 22.03 released with Firewall4, now supports over 1,580 embedded devices

OpenWrt 22.03 released with Firewall4, now supports over 1,580 embedded devices

OpenWrt 22.03

OpenWrt 22.03 open-source Linux operating system for routers and entry-level embedded devices has just been released with over 3800 commits since the release of OpenWrt 21.02 nearly exactly one year ago. The new version features Firewall4 based on nftables, switching from the earlier iptables-based Firewall3, and adds support for over 180 new devices for a total of more than 1,580 embedded devices, including 15 devices capable of WiFi 6 connectivity using the MediaTek MT7915 wifi chip. OpenWrt developers explain that Firewall4 keeps the same the UCI firewall configuration syntax and should work as a drop-in replacement with most common setups, just generating nftables rules instead of iptables ones. You’ll find more details about OpenWrt firewall configuration in the documentation. OpenWrt 21.02 added initial support for the Distributed Switch Architecture (DSA), the Linux standard for configurable Ethernet switches, and OpenWrt 22.03 migrated more targets from swconfig to DSA namely all bcm53xx […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 8 Comments on POP32 & POP64 SIPs combine Allwinner A33 and A133 with SDRAM into a single package

POP32 & POP64 SIPs combine Allwinner A33 and A133 with SDRAM into a single package

POP32 POP64 Allwinner SIPs

Kettlepop is a board based on Allwinner GR8 system-in-package (SiP) with an Allwinner R8/A13 Arm Cortex-A8 CPU and 256MB RAM, and itself a derivative of the CHIP Pro board from Next Thing Co that closed doors a few years ago. Source Parts has just posted an update explaining that the GR8 SiP is not available anymore, so they worked on their own SiPs: POP32 and POP64. POP32 combines an Allwinner A33 quad-core Cortex-A7 processor with 128MB DDR4, while POP64 features an Allwinner A133 quad-core Cortex-A53 processor with 1GB LPDDR4. POP32 system-in-package POP32 highlights: SoC – Allwinner A33 quad-core Arm Cortex-A7 processor with Arm Mali-400 MP2, 1080p60 H.264, VP8, MPEG 1/2/4, JPEG/MJPEG video decoding, 1080p60 H.264 video encoding Memory – Built-in 128MB DDR3 Peripherals from SoC Storage I/F – NAND flash, 3x SD/MMC Display – MIPI DSI, LVDS, RGB LCD up to 1280×800 resolution Camera I/F – Parallel camera interface up […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment on Lakka 4.0 game emulator released with LibreELEC 10.0.2 and RetroArch 1.10.1

Lakka 4.0 game emulator released with LibreELEC 10.0.2 and RetroArch 1.10.1

Lakka 4.0 release

Lakka 4.0 is the latest release of the game emulator based on LibreELEC 10.0.2 and RetroArch 1.10.1 frontend GUI for LibRetro game emulators cores. While Lakka was initially designed for Raspberry Pi boards in a way similar to RetroPie, it also works just fine on many other Arm platforms and PCs. Main changes to Lakka 4.0 compared to version 3.7: Build system based on LibreELEC 10.0.2 RetroArch updated to 1.10.1 Cores updated to their most recent versions superbroswar: added new libretro core sameduck: added new libretro core Mesa updated to 22.0.0 Mainline kernel updated to 5.10.103 (PC, Amlogic, Allwinner, NXP) Raspberry kernel updated to 5.10.95 Most arm devices switched to aarch64 Rockchip RK3288, RK3328 and RK3399 switched to mainline kernel 5.10.76 Added support for additional Allwinner and Amlogic devices (not tested on our side, as we do not own many of these devices) Nintendo Switch: complete rewrite of the port […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments on Linux 5.17 release – Main changes, Arm, RISC-V, and MIPS architectures

Linux 5.17 release – Main changes, Arm, RISC-V, and MIPS architectures

Linux 5.17 changelog

Linus Torvalds has just released Linux 5.17: So we had an extra week of at the end of this release cycle, and I’m happy to report that it was very calm indeed. We could probably have skipped it with not a lot of downside, but we did get a few last-minute reverts and fixes in and avoid some brown-paper bugs that would otherwise have been stable fodder, so it’s all good. And that calm last week can very much be seen from the appended shortlog – there really aren’t a lot of commits in here, and it’s all pretty small. Most of it is in drivers (net, usb, drm), with some core networking, and some tooling updates too. It really is small enough that you can just scroll through the details below, and the one-liner summaries will give a good flavor of what happened last week. Of course, this means […]