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Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments on Ubuntu, Tizen, XMBC… Demos at Q2.12 Linaro Connect in Hong Kong

Ubuntu, Tizen, XMBC… Demos at Q2.12 Linaro Connect in Hong Kong

Linaro has announced several demos would take place at Linaro Connect on June 1st, 2012 in Hong Kong: Big.LITTLE in-kernel Switcher (Linaro) SIProp – Combat Scouter – How much your Combat Power? (SIProp) Android Toolchain Improvements (Linaro) Origen Running Awesome Code (Linaro) Snowball with MM enablement (Linaro) Tizen on Snowball (Linaro) Google+ Hangouts on an ARM Board (Linaro) Low-Cost Logic Analyzer (Linaro) XBMC on Snowball – ST Ericsson Snowball (Linaro) (Ubuntu) Unity 3D on Snowball (Linaro) Ubuntu TV on Snowball (Linaro) PCM (Phase Change Memory) : Linaro kernel meets with the PCM technology (Micron) ARM DS-5 & Linaro (ARM) Most of the demos will be organized by Linaro, but three others companies will also shown the “show”, namely SIProp, Micron and ARM. It’s always interested to see what happens at Linaro because it gives a view into the future to what may comes to the new products and developers can see what new features are available for […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments on IAR Systems I-jet Hardware Debugging Probe Is Now Available

IAR Systems I-jet Hardware Debugging Probe Is Now Available

IAR Systems has announced the availability of I-jet, a new in-circuit debugging probe that can be used in conjunction with Embedded Workbench for ARM, IAR C/C++ compiler and debugger tool suite. I-jet provides download speeds of up to 1 MB per second, JTAG and Serial Wire Debug (SWD) clocking at up to 32 MHz (no limit on the MCU clock speed), and Serial Wire Output (SWO) frequencies of up to 60 MHz. I-jet probe is powered by USB and can also power the target board (Up to 400mA) and measure the power consumption accuratly (200 uA @ 200khz). The probe is plug-and-play, and supports automatic core recognition, and direct download into the flash memory. I-Jet supports ARM7, ARM9, ARM11, ARM Cortex-M, ARM Cortex-R4, and ARM Cortex-A5/A8/A9 cores. Serial Wire Viewer (SWV), Embedded Trace Buffer (ETB) and JTAG adaptive clocking are supported and all JTAG signals can be monitored. The probe […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments on MIPS Introduces microAptiv, interAptiv and proAptiv Cores

MIPS Introduces microAptiv, interAptiv and proAptiv Cores

MIPS Technologies has introduced their new Aptiv generation of microprocessor cores divided into 3 families: proAptiv, interAptiv and microAptiv. proAptiv Core (equivalent to ARM Cortex A15 DMIPS/Mhz) The proAptiv core achieves a 4.4 CoreMark/MHz score which according to MIPS is the best score reported for any licensable IP core. It also achieves 3.5 DMIPS/MHz which is abnout the same performance as ARM Cortex A15.  This core targeted at high performance applications such as smartphones, tablets, HD STB, automotive infotainment and residential gateways. proAptiv is recommended as an upgrade to MIPS32 74K/1074K cores. interAptiv Core (equivalent to ARM Cortex-R5 DMIPS/Mhz) The multi-threaded interAptiv core delivers higher CoreMark/MHz (3.2) than competing cores in similar die area and 1.7 DMIPS/MHz per core. The interAptiv is aimed at mid-range applications such as mainstream STB, digital cameras, mid-range smartphone, broadband CPE (Consumer Premise Equipment) and SATA/SSD controllers. microAptiv Core (equivalent to ARM Cortex-M3/M4 DMIPS/Mhz) The […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 18 Comments on Getting Started with MultiArch (armel / armhf) in Ubuntu

Getting Started with MultiArch (armel / armhf) in Ubuntu

Until now, I used xapt and dpkg-cross to install cross libraries for armel, but since I’ve upgraded to Ubuntu 12.04, it appears to be broken. I’ve contacted Linaro about this issue, and the “cross-building” expert at Linaro (wookey) recommended me to use multiarch instead, as xapt/dpkg-cross will be eventually deprecated. He provided me an example showing how-to use multiarch to build Chromium. I’ve been looking for a “How-to multiarch”, but haven’t been able to find something really clear and simple, so I thought I would post it here. In the example, they used a chroot for cross-building, which is probably a good idea to avoid messing up with the system. It’s also possible multiarch is not 100% reliable, and I’ve read stories where people messed up their system when using multiarch with i386 (32-bit) and amd64 (64-bit). Preparing a chroot for cross-building I’ll use a 32-bit Ubuntu precise chroot, but […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 4 Comments on Building Chromium OS for Raspberry Pi (ARMv6)

Building Chromium OS for Raspberry Pi (ARMv6)

I had previously written the instructions to build an older version of Chromium (via Berkelium) for ARM using Beagleboard/Overo rootfs in order to use it with Xibo digital signage. Recently I’ve been contacted by hexxeh, who maintains Chromium OS vanilla builds for x86 and MacOS computer, as he intends to provide Chromium OS for the Raspberry Pi, and you should be able to get a SD card image once everything is working from the site above. Today, I’ll post the steps followed to build Chromium OS LKGR (“the latest revision to pass only unit tests”) optimized for  ARMv6 processor with soft-float support, which is the type of processor (Broadcom BCM2835) used in the Raspberry Pi. Please note that although it can build, it still does not run properly and a few more changes are needed. First, you’ll need a fast machine to build Chromium OS in a reasonable amount of […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments on ARM Development Studio 5 (DS 5) Demos At Design West

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 […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment on ARM Releases Ne10: An Open Source Library with NEON Optimized Functions

ARM Releases Ne10: An Open Source Library with NEON Optimized Functions

Arm NE10

The Advanced SIMD extension (aka NEON or “MPE” Media Processing Engine) is a combined 64- and 128-bit single instruction multiple data (SIMD) instruction set that provides standardized acceleration for media and signal processing applications for ARM Cortex-A (ARMv7) processors and the goal of these instructions is similar to MMX, SSE, and 3DNow! extensions for x86 processors. Starting early 2011, ARM has been working internally on a project codenamed Snappy to develop common functions accelerated by NEON. They have now released the first version of Snappy, now called the Ne10 library, which is available on GitHub at https://github.com/projectNe10/Ne10 . The code has been developed in C and Assembler and tested on Ubuntu on ARM (Linaro). A Makefile is also included to build it for Android (AOSP). The current functions include vector and matrix operations accelerated by NEON instructions. Since the library is open source, ARM hopes developers will make use of the Ne10 […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 10 Comments on Cross-compiling the ARM Linux Kernel in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

Cross-compiling the ARM Linux Kernel in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

Yesterday I installed Ubuntu 12.04 ‘Precise’ Beta 1 in Virtual Box to give it a try (I could not manage to have HUD working btw), and today, I’ve noticed an article entitled “Ubuntu 12.04 ‘precise’ and cross compilation of ARM kernels” explaining how to build Linaro ARM kernel in Ubuntu 12.04. So I’ve decided to give it a try, especially it seems straightforward. I followed the instructions in the aforementioned link,  it basically worked except I had to install dpkg-dev package that also installed the build essentials (gcc, g++, etc…) and use sudo for some commands. You’ll notice the name change for the ARM gcc toolchain as it now uses hard-float by default which seems to provide quite a boost in performance for the Pandaboard. Here are the steps I followed: Install the ARM GCC cross compiler and the development package of dpkg:

Retrieve the kernel source:

Install […]