Embedded Linux Conference 2015 Schedule – IoT, Cars, and Drones

Embedded Linux Conference 2015 will take place in San Jose, California, on March 23 – 25, 2015, and will focus on Drones, Things and Automobiles. The schedule has been published, and whether you’ll attend or not, it’s always interested to have a look at what will be talked about to have a peak into the future of Embedded Linux, or simply keep abreast with the progress in the field. So as usual, I’ve gone through the schedule, and made my own virtual program with talks that I find interesting. Monday 23rd 9:00 – 9:30 – Driving standards and Open Source to Grow the Internet of Things by Mark Skarpness, Director of Systems Engineering at Intel Billions of devices are beginning to come online, and many of these devices, large and small, are running open source software.  To fuel this innovation, it’s more important than ever for these devices to use […]

Gateworks GW5520 Single Board Computer Features Dual Gigabit Ethernet Ports, Two mini PCIe Slots

If you need industrial grade ARM Linux boards with lots of Ethernet ports and several mini PCIe slots, you may want to check out Gateworks Ventana boards. The company has now released a smaller member of Ventana family with GW5520 SBC powered by Freescale i.MX6 dual, with two Gigabit Ethernet port, two mini PCIe slots, and support for PoE. Gateworks Ventana GW5520 SBC specifications: SoC- Freescale i.MX6 Dual Cortex A9 processor @ 800MHz with Vivante Vivante GC2000 / GC355 / GC320 GPUs. Option: i.MX6 Quad System Memory – 512 MB DDR3-800 SDRAM (Up to 2GB RAM as option) Storage – 256 MB Flash (Up to 2GB as option), serial configuration EEPROM Video and Audio Output – HDMI 1.4 Connectivity – 2x Gigabit Ethernet ports. USB – 2x USB 2.0 host ports Expansion 2x Mini-PCIe sockets Optional mini-PCIe socket to supports a mSATA disk drive (i.MX6 Quad only)  I/Os Serial – […]

Linaro 15.01 Release with Linux 3.19 and Android 5.0

Linaro has just announced the first release of the year with Linux 3.19-rc3 (baseline), Linux 3.10.65 and 3.14.29 (LSK), Android 5.0.2, and Ubuntu Linaro Utopic. Changes seem to have focused on ARM, Qualcomm, and HiSilicon hardware platforms such as Juno, and IFC6410, and some work has been done on Debian ARM64 rootfs. Here are the highlights of this release: Linux Linaro 3.19-rc5-2015.01 GATOR topic updated to version 5.20.1 builddeb topic: fixes for the dtb files location changes in 3.19 (vendor subdir introduced) updated integration-linaro-vexpress64 topic by ARM LT (FVP Base and Foundation models, and Juno support) updated topic from Qualcomm LT (IFC6410 board support) updated topic from HiSilicon LT (Hi36xx, HiP04, and X5HD2 families support) updated LLVM topic (uses the community llvmlinux-latest branch) Included ILP32 patch set v3 rebased on 3.19-rc5. Initial tests using syscalls LTP tests are done: msgctl07 stalls when using ILP32 userland (no stall with LP64 userland). […]

Linaro 14.12 Release with Linux 3.18 and Android 5.0

Linaro usually releases images and source code on the last Thursday of the month, but since most people will have long holidays for Chritsmas and New Year, the last working Thrusday of this month was yesterday (18th). Linaro 14.12 release includes Linux kernel 3.18 (baseline), Linux 3.10.62 & 3.14.26 (LSK, same versions as last month), and Android 5.0.1 Lollipop. Here are the highlights of this release: Linux Linaro 3.18-2014.12 Based on v3.18 release GATOR topic: version 5.20 updated topic from Qualcomm LT (includes IFC6410 board support) updated integration-linaro-vexpress64 topic by ARM LT (FVP Base and Foundation models, and Juno support) updated LLVM topic (uses the community llvmlinux-latest branch) included ILP32 patch set v3  rebased on 3.18. Boot tested with aarch64 userland. Work is in progress to test with aarch64-ilp32 userland. config fragments updated – SELinux related config options enabled in linaro-base.conf, device tree runtime self tests enabled in distribution.conf Linaro […]

Linaro 14.11 Release with Kernel 3.18, Android 5.0, & Ubuntu Utopic. Debian 8.0 Gets ARM64 Port

Linaro 14.11 has been released with Linux kernel 3.18-rc5 (baseline), Linux 3.10.61 & 3.14.25 (LSK, same versions as last month), and Android 4.4.2, 4.4.4, and for the first time Android 5.0 Lollipop. There’s also been some news with regards to Linux desktop distributions, as Ubuntu baseline has been upgraded to Utopic (14.10), and Debian 8.0 (Jessie) will officially support ARM64 with 93% of packages built as of November 5th. Android Lollipop images are said to be built for TC2, Juno, Nexus 7, Nexus 10, and FVP models, but I could not find the images. Finally, it’s the first time I’ve noticed Hisilicon X5HD2 development board with a dual core Cortex A9 processor, but apparently it’s the same as Hi3716cv200. Here are the highlights of this release: Linux Linaro 3.18-rc5-2014.11 updated GATOR to version 5.20 updated topic from Qualcomm LT (include IFC6410 board support) updated integration-linaro-vexpress64 topic by ARM LT (FVP […]

Free Electrons Publishes Yocto & OpenEmbedded Training Materials

Free Electrons is a small (9 people) engineering company focusing on embedded Linux / Android, and open source software, which also happens to have ported several ARM SoC to the mainline kernel. From time to time, they also offer training sessions, and release course materials publicly. Their latest training is a 3-day course dealing with the Yocto Project and OpenEmbedded, using BeagbleBone Black development board for lab sessions, and all materials have been released under a Creative Commons license. The training consists in: Understanding the Yocto Project Using it to build a root filesystem and run it on your target Writing and extending recipes Creating layers Integrating your board in a BSP Creating custom images Application development with an Eclipse SDK Three files are released: yocto-slides.pdf – Yocto Project and OpenEmbedded Training presentation slides (245 pages) give an overview of various build systems, before getting more details about the Yocto […]

Linaro 14.10 Release with Kernel 3.17 and Android 4.4.4, Debian ARM64 Port Almost Complete

Linaro 14.10 has just been released with Linux kernel 3.17 (baseline), Linux 3.10.54 & 3.14.19 (LSK, same versions as last month), and Android 4.4.2 & 4.4.4. Most of the work is a continuation of previous months working member hardware, and ARM64, but one particularly interesting point is that 90% of Debian packages have been built for ARM64, and the next version of Debian should have an official ARM64 port. Here are the highlights of this release: Linux Linaro 3.17-2014.10 updated linaro-android topic. In particular, CONFIG_IPV6=y is no longer the requirement for linux-linaro tree builds GATOR version 5.19 (same version as in 2014.08 release). gatord is fixed to build for ARMv8. dropped multi_pmu_v2 topic by ARM LT (no longer used) updated topic from Qualcomm LT (include IFC6410 board support) replaced integration-linaro-vexpress topic by integration-linaro-vexpress64. Starting from 2014.10 release, linux-linaro kernel tree will use the mainline support for 32-bit vexpress boards. integration-linaro-vexpress64 […]

Linaro 14.09 Release with Kernel 3.17 and Android 4.4.4

Linaro 14.09 has just been released with Linux kernel 3.17-rc4 (baseline), Linux 3.10.54 & 3.14.19 (LSK), and Android 4.4.2 & 4.4.4. Linaro has kept working on their member boards such as IFC6410 (Qualcomm), D01 (Huawei/Hisilicon), Ardnale (Samsung), and Juno (ARM). They’ve also announced they’ll change the tools to build GCC by using cbuild2 instead of cbuild1 for next release, and they’ve enabled a build with gcov (for code coverage analysis) which may mean they’ll work on reducing the kernel size by getting rid off unused code. I’ve also noticed the Arndale and Arndale Octa Ubuntu images are now based on Linux LSK with Mali GPU support since last month. Here are the highlights of this release: Linux Linaro 3.17-rc4-2014.09 GATOR version 5.19 updated topic from Qualcomm LT (ifc6410 board support) and HiSilicon LT updated Versatile Express ARM64 support (FVP Base and Foundation models, Juno) from ARM LT. updated Versatile Express […]

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