Linux 4.10 Release – Main Changes, ARM & MIPS Architectures

Linus Torvalds has just released Linux 4.10: So there it is, the final 4.10 release. It’s been quiet since rc8, but we did end up fixing several small issues, so the extra week was all good. On the whole, 4.10 didn’t end up as small as it initially looked. After the huge release that was 4.9, I expected things to be pretty quiet, but it ended up very much a fairly average release by modern kernel standards. So we have about 13,000 commits (not counting merges – that would be another 1200+ commits if you count those). The work is all over, obviously – the shortlog below is just the changes in the last week, since rc8. Go out and verify that it’s all good, and I’ll obviously start pulling stuff for 4.11 on Monday. Linus Linux 4.9 added Greybus staging support, improved security thanks to virtually mapped kernel stacks, […]

CHUWI LapBook 14.1 Windows 10 Firmware, Drivers, and BIOS

In case you’ve installed another operating system like Ubuntu on CHUWI Lapbook 14.1 laptop, and want to re-install Windows 10, CHUWI has released Windows 10 firmware, drivers, and LapBook 14.1 “BIOS” in their forums. So I’ve re-installed Windows 10 on the laptop using the Windows 10 image. You’ll need to download the 8 files CHUWI LapBook 14.1 Windows.part1.rar to CHUWI LapBook 14.1 Windows.part8.rar, and after extracting them you should get a “CHUWI LapBook 14.1 Windows” directory with all necessary files to reinstall Windows. The files take 8GB, so it may not fit on all 8GB flash drives, and you may need to use a 16GB or greater drive. I just copied the files to an 64GB flash drive formatted with NTFS, insert the drive into the USB 2.0 port of the laptop, and I could start the installation process at boot time. However, it quickly failed as it tried to […]

Embedded Linux Conference & OpenIoT Summit 2017 Schedule

The Embedded Linux Conference 2017 and the OpenIoT Summit 2017 will take place earlier than last year, on February  20 – 23, 2017 in Portland, Oregon, USA. This will be the 12th year for ELC, where kernel & system developers, userspace developers, and product vendors meet and collaborate. The schedule has been posted on the Linux Foundation website, and whether you’re going to attend or not, it’s always informative to check out the topics. So as usual, I’ll make a virtual schedule for all 5 days. Monday, February 20 For the first day, the selection is easy, as choices are limited, and the official first day it actually on Tuesday. You can either attend a full-day paid training sessions entitled “Building A Low Powered Smart Appliance Workshop“, and the only session that day: 14:30 – 15:20 – Over-the-air (OTA) Software Updates without Downtime or Service Disruption, by Alfred Bratterud, IncludeOS […]

Linux 4.8 Release – Main Changes, ARM & MIPS Architectures

Linus Torvalds has officially released Linux 4.8 last Sunday: So the last week was really quiet, which maybe means that I could probably just have skipped rc8 after all. Oh well, no real harm done. This obviously means that the merge window for 4.9 is open, and I appreciate the people who already sent in some pull requests early due to upcoming travel or other reasons. I’ll start pulling things tomorrow, and have even the most eager developers and testers hopefully test the final 4.8 release before the next development kernels start coming 😉 Anyway, there’s a few stragging fixes since rc8 listed below: it’s a mixture of arch fixes (arm, mips, sparc, x86), drivers (networking, nvdimm, gpu) and generic code (some core networking, with a few filesystem, cgroup and and vm things). All of it pretty small, and there really aren’t that many of them. Go forth and test, […]

Amlogic S905 Source Code Published – Linux, U-Boot, Mali-450 GPU and Other Drivers

Amlogic has an open linux website where they regurlarly release GPL source code, and with Amlogic S905 devices coming to market, they’ve released a few tarballs at the beginning of the month including Linux 3.14 source code, U-boot source code, and Mali-450MP GPU kernel source code (obviously not userspace), as well as some other drivers for WiFi, NAND flash, PMU, TVIN, etc… Let’s get to the download links: Linux 3.14.29 source code U-boot 2015.01 GPU drivers for ARM Mali-450MP Broadcom and Realtek Wifi drivers and firmware (November 4, 2015) can be found @ http://openlinux.amlogic.com:8000/download/ARM/wifi/. Other kernel modules (November 4, 2015) @ http://openlinux.amlogic.com:8000/download/ARM/modules/. I quickly tried to build the Linux source. If you’ve never build a 64-bit ARM kernel or app before, you’ll fist need to install the toolchain. I installed the one provided with Ubuntu 14.04:

Now extract the tarball and enter the source directory:

At first I […]

TBS5520 Multi-Standard Tuner Box and Linux Drivers

TBS Technologies is a company that specializes in digital TV tuner cards for PC, and recently they’ve also worked on ARM based boards or devices such as the Matrix 2. The company has sent me one of their TBS5520 USB tuner board and box supporting DVB-T2, DVB-S2, DVB-C and ISDB-T for evaluation, as well as some Linux drivers. Today, I’ll provide some specifications, take some pictures, and show how I compiled and installed the drivers in my Ubuntu 14.04 computer. TBS 5520 Tuner Box specifications TBS5520 is a multi-standard USB tuner with the following features: USB – USB 2.0 device port Antenna connectors – 1x LNB IN, 1x RF IN Standards DVB-S2/S Symbol rate: 1~45Msps; FEC  DVB-S2: 8PSK: 3/5, 2/3, 3/4, 4/5, 5/6, 8/9, 9/10; DVB-S:  QPSK: 1/2, 2/3, 3/4, 5/6, 7/8 DVB-T2/T  Receiving channel: VHF band, UHF band; Bandwidth: 1.7,5, 6, 7, 8 MHz; FEC: QPSK, 16QAM, 64QAM, 256QAM […]

Linux 4.2 Release – Main Changes, ARM and MIPS Architectures

Linus Torvalds released Linux Kernel 4.2 last Sunday: So judging by how little happened this week, it wouldn’t have been a mistake to release 4.2 last week after all, but hey, there’s certainly a few fixes here, and it’s not like delaying 4.2 for a week should have caused any problems either. So here it is, and the merge window for 4.3 is now open. I already have a few pending early pull requests, but as usual I’ll start processing them tomorrow and give the release some time to actually sit. The shortlog from rc8 is tiny, and appended. The patch is pretty tiny too. Go get it, Linus Some notable changes made to Linux 4.2 include: File systems New features for F2FS including per file encryption CIFS support SMB 3.1.1 (experimental) Cryptography – Jitter Entropy Random Number Generator, Chacha20 stream cipher and Poly1305 authentication (RFC7539),New RSA implementation. See lwn.net […]

Open Source Linux Drivers for PowerVR GPUs Might Be in the Works

When I write about a new processor with a PowerVR GPU, I can be sure there will be one or two comments saying something like “It has a PowerVR GPU, it’s a non-starter”, mostly because of the status of graphics drivers in Linux. Luc Verhaegen (libv) also made a presentation at FOSDEM 2013 listing various open source projects for GPUs found in ARM processors and PowerVR was the only one without any community project. Bear in mind that apart from Nvidia, and to some extend Broadcom for the VideoCore IV GPU found in  BCM2835 / BCM2836 processors used in Raspberry Pi boards, no other companies have released user space drivers for their GPUs, and all work is done by volunteers for other open source GPU drivers, and I’m not sure any of them work 100% yet. Imagination has already provided working GPU drivers for their MIPS Creator-CI20 board, these are […]

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