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December 13, 2022February 20, 2023 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 6 Comments

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

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 […]

January 4, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 15 Comments

The Linux kernel could soon be 50 to 80% faster to build

The Linux kernel takes around 5 minutes (without modules) to build on an Intel Core i5 Jasper Lake mini PC with 16 GB RAM and a fast SSD based on our recent review of Beelink GTi 11 mini PC. Kernel developers may have to build for different targets and configurations, plus all modules so the build times may add up. While it is always possible to throw more hardware to quicken the builds, it would be good if significantly faster builts could be achieved with software optimizations. That’s exactly what Ingo Molnar has been working on since late 2020 with his “Fast Kernel Headers” project aiming to eliminate the Linux kernel’s “Dependency Hell”. At the time he aimed for a 20% speedup, but a little over one year later, the results are much more impressive with 50 to 80% faster builds depending on the target platform (x86-64, arm64, etc…) and […]

June 28, 2021July 2, 2021 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

Linux 5.13 Release – Notable changes, Arm, MIPS and RISC-V architectures

Linus Torvalds has just announced the release of Linux 5.13: So we had quite the calm week since rc7, and I see no reason to delay 5.13. The shortlog for the week is tiny, with just 88 non-merge commits (and a few of those are just reverts). It’s a fairly random mix of fixes, and being so small I’d just suggest people scan the appended shortlog for what happened. Of course, if the last week was small and calm, 5.13 overall is actually fairly large. In fact, it’s one of the bigger 5.x releases, with over 16k commits (over 17k if you count merges), from over 2k developers. But it’s a “big all over” kind of thing, not something particular that stands out as particularly unusual. Some of the extra size might just be because 5.12 had that extra rc week. And with 5.13 out the door, that obviously means […]

February 15, 2021February 17, 2021 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 8 Comments

Linux 5.11 Release – Main Changes, Arm, MIPS & RISC-V Architectures

Linus Torvalds has released Linux 5.11 just in time for… “Valentine’s Day”: Nothing unexpected or particularly scary happened this week, so here we are – with 5.11 tagged and pushed out. In fact, it’s a smaller-than-average set of commits from rc7 to final, which makes me happy. And I already have several pull requests lined up for tomorrow, so we’re all set for the merge window to start. But in the meantime – and yes, I know it’s Valentine’s Day here in the US – maybe give this release a good testing before you go back and play with development kernels. All right? Because I’m sure your SO will understand. Linus Last time around, Linux 5.10 was an LTS release that added EXT-4 performance enhancements, improved post-Spectre performance, as well as the enablement of BCM2711 (Raspberry Pi 4) display pipeline, among other many changes. Some of the notable changes in […]

December 15, 2020December 15, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Linux 5.10 LTS release – Main changes, Arm, MIPS and RISC-V architectures

Linus Torvalds has just released Linux 5.10: Ok, here it is – 5.10 is tagged and pushed out. I pretty much always wish that the last week was even calmer than it was, and that’s true here too. There’s a fair amount of fixes in here, including a few last-minute reverts for things that didn’t get fixed, but nothing makes me go “we need another week”. Things look fairly normal. It’s mostly drivers – as it should be – with a smattering of fixes all over: networking, architectures, filesystems, tooling.. The shortlog is appended, and scanning it gives a good idea of what kind of things are there. Nothing that looks scary: most of the patches are very small, and the biggest one is fixing pin mapping definitions for a pincontrol driver. This also obviously means that the merge window for 5.11 will start tomorrow. I already have a couple […]

November 16, 2020 by Abhishek Jadhav - 1 Comment

LibIIO – Library for interfacing Linux industrial I/O devices

For more than 6 years, the LibIIO library has existed to ease the development of software interfacing Linux Industrial I/O (IIO) devices. It is part of the Linux Kernel and a subsystem that provides support for devices like analog to digital or digital to analog converters (ADCs, DACs). This subsystem includes ADCs, accelerometers, pressure sensors, color, light and proximity sensors, temperature sensors, RF transceivers, and many more. You can use LibIIO natively on an embedded Linux target. It is cross-platform, supporting Linux, Windows, and Mac OS. Analog Devices Inc. was the main company behind LibIIO development, which is currently an active open-source library, which many people have contributed to. What does LibIIO do? LibIIO will identify the channels that belong to each device. It will assign specific attributes, one for the channels and one for the devices. Then, it will also create a context that is a place where all […]

November 25, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments

Linux 5.4 Release – Main Changes, Arm, MIPS & RISC-V Architectures

Linus Torvalds has just announced the release of Linux 5.4: Not a lot happened this last week, which is just how I like it. And as expected, most of the pull requests I got were for the 5.5 merge window, which I’ll obviously start working through tomorrow. What little there is here is mostly some networking updates (mix of network drivers and core networking), and some minor GPU driver updates. Other than that it’s a small collection of random other things all over. The appended shortlog is small enough that you might as well just scroll through it. Anyway, this obviously opens the merge window for 5.5. It’s not ideal timing with Thanksgiving week coming up, but it hopefully shouldn’t be too much of an issue. If I fall behind (not because I’m all that big of a fan of the indiscriminate and relentless turkey-killing holiday) it’s because we’ve got […]

November 4, 2019November 4, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 30 Comments

Fix for Raspberry Pi 4 4GB model’s USB Ports not Working on Ubuntu 19.10

Ubuntu 19.10 server was recently released with official support for Raspberry Pi 4 SBC. Shortly after I read stories about the USB ports not working on the board, but it took another interesting turn as Canonical now explains the bug only affects RPI 4 with 4GB RAM, and USB works just fine on boards with just 1/2GB RAM. The issue has been identified and it’s been found to be a kernel bug with a solution in the works that being tested. In the meantime, you can access to your Raspberry Pi 4 4GB USB ports by limiting the memory to 3GB in /boot/firmware/usercfg.txt as follows:

total_mem=3072

1	total_mem=3072

Alternatively here’s the link to an updated kernel provided by Hui Wang with you want to test it out: I built a testing kernel, not only includes the fix for USB host, but also includes all new patches from https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux.git rpi-5.3.y branch (about 107 […]