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July 15, 2024July 16, 2024 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

Linux 6.10 Release – Notable changes, Arm, RISC-V, and MIPS architectures

Linux Torvalds has announced the release of Linux 6.10 on LKML: So the final week was perhaps not quote as quiet as the preceding ones, which I don’t love – but it also wasn’t noisy enough to warrant an extra rc. And much of the noise this last week was bcachefs again (with netfs a close second), so it was all pretty compartmentalized. In fact, about a third of the patch for the last week was filesystem-related (there were also some btrfs latency fixes and other noise), which is unusual, but none of it looks particularly scary. Another third was drivers, and the rest is “random”. Anyway, this obviously means that the merge window for 6.11 opens up tomorrow. Let’s see how that goes, with much of Europe probably making ready for summer vacation. And the shortlog below is – as always – just the last week, not some kind […]

July 1, 2024July 1, 2024 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 21 Comments

Amlogic S905X5M vs S905X4 – Features and benchmarks comparison

Amlogic S905X5M is an update to the Amlogic S905X4 quad-core Cortex-A55 SoC with a higher 2.5 GHz CPU clock and a new generation Arm G310 CPU that delivers up to close to three times the performance of the Mali-G31 MP2 GPU for more advanced and smoother HDR user interfaces. The S905X5M and S905X4 share the same video decoding capabilities, notably AV1 and H265 up to 4Kp75, but the new S905X5M drops support for H.265 1080p60 video encoding, only keeping H.264 1080p30. One of the new features is the inclusion of an NPU designed specifically for Super Resolution enabling video upscaling with better image quality. You’ll find the differences between the Amlogic S905X5M and S905X5 processors in the comparison table below. The Amlogic S905X5M adds some HDMI 2.1 features that deserve an explanation: QMS (Quick Media Switching) – A source device can instantly switch its content’s resolution or frame rate without […]

May 13, 2024 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

Linux 6.9 release – Main changes, Arm, RISC-V, and MIPS architectures

Linus Torvalds has just announced the release of Linux 6.9 on LKML: So Thorsten is still reporting a few regression fixes that haven’t made it to me yet, but none of them look big or worrisome enough to delay the release for another week. We’ll have to backport them when they get resolved and hit upstream. So 6.9 is now out, and last week has looked quite stable (and the whole release has felt pretty normal). Below is the shortlog for the last week, with the changes mostly being dominated by some driver updates (gpu and networking being the big ones, but “big” is still pretty small, and there’s various other driver noise in there too). Outside of drivers, it’s some filesystem fixes (bcachefs still stands out, but ksmbd shows up too), some late selftest fixes, and some core networking fixes. And I now have a more powerful arm64 machine […]

March 11, 2024 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Linux 6.8 release – Notable changes, Arm, RISC-V, and MIPS architectures

Linus Torvalds has just announced the release of Linux 6.8 on the Linux kernel mailing list: So it took a bit longer for the commit counts to come down this release than I tend to prefer, but a lot of that seemed to be about various selftest updates (networking in particular) rather than any actual real sign of problems. And the last two weeks have been pretty quiet, so I feel there’s no real reason to delay 6.8. We always have some straggling work, and we’ll end up having some of it pushed to stable rather than hold up the new code. Nothing worrisome enough to keep the regular release schedule from happening. As usual, the shortlog below is just for the last week since rc7, the overall changes in 6.8 are obviously much much bigger. This is not the historically big release that 6.7 was – we seem to […]

January 8, 2024 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Linux 6.7 release – Main changes, Arm, RISC-V, and MIPS architectures

Linus Torvalds has just announced the release of Linux 6.7, following Linux 6.6 LTS a little over two months ago: So we had a little bit more going on last week compared to the holiday week before that, but certainly not enough to make me think we’d want to delay this any further. End result: 6.7 is (in number of commits: over 17k non-merge commits, with 1k+ merges) one of the largest kernel releases we’ve ever had, but the extra rc8 week was purely due to timing with the holidays, not about any difficulties with the larger release. The main changes this last week were a few DRM updates (mainly fixes for new hw enablement in this version – both amd and nouveau), some more bcachefs fixes (and bcachefs is obviously new to 6.7 and one of the reasons for the large number of commits), and then a few random […]

August 28, 2023August 28, 2023 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

Linux 6.5 release – Notable changes, Arm, RISC-V and MIPS architectures

Linus Torvalds has just announced the release of Linux 6.5 on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML): So nothing particularly odd or scary happened this last week, so there is no excuse to delay the 6.5 release. I still have this nagging feeling that a lot of people are on vacation and that things have been quiet partly due to that. But this release has been going smoothly, so that’s probably just me being paranoid. The biggest patches this last week were literally just to our selftests. The shortlog below is obviously not the 6.5 release log, it’s purely just the last week since rc7. Anyway, this obviously means that the merge window for 6.6 starts tomorrow. I already have ~20 pull requests pending and ready to go, but before we start the next merge frenzy, please give this final release one last round of testing, ok? Linus The earlier […]

July 5, 2023 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

Amlogic C302X, C305X, and C308X Arm SoCs target Smart IP cameras

Amlogic C302X and C305X are dual-core Arm Cortex-A35 processors, while the C308X is a dual-core Cortex-A55 processor with all SoCs designed for Smart IP cameras with the integration of an AI accelerator up to 4 TOPS, and 1080p30 H.264/H.265 video encoding. I was first informed about Amlogic C302/C305/C308 SoCs for Smart cameras as far back as June 2019, or about four years ago, but there wasn’t enough information to write anything about those at the time. But I’m now seeing more details about the camera SoCs, now named C302X, C305X, and C308X, so it’s a good time to have a closer look. Amlogic C302X Amlogic does not have a product page for this model, so I need to rely on a recent commit in the Linux Kernel mainline list to extra some information. The Amlogic S302X is a dual-core Cortex-A35 processor found in the Amlogic AW409 development board (likely internal […]

March 7, 2023 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 13 Comments

LibreELEC 11 released with Kodi 20, brings back Amlogic platforms

LibreELEC 11 lightweight media center Linux distribution based on Kodi 20 “Nexus” has just been released with various improvements on x86 and Arm platforms. Kodi 20 was released and available for download in January with AV1 hardware video decoding in Android and x86 (VAAPI) platforms with AV1-capable GPU or VPU, FFMPEG 4.4, Pipewire support in Linux, and a few others. LibreELEC 11 enables you to have a dedicated, and fast booting, HTPC based on a mini PC, a Raspberry Pi SBC, or an Arm-based TV box with all features from the latest Kodi release. LibreELEC 11 supports Raspberry Pi 2 to 4 SBCs, 64-bit x86 hardware, various Allwinner, Rockchip, and Amlogic SBCs and TV boxes with x86, Raspberry Pi, and Rockchip hardware considered more stable and feature complete. LibreELEC 10.0 did away with Amlogic TV boxes and single board computers because of driver issues, but LibreELEC 11.0 brings Amlogic back […]