Linaro 12.11 Release with Linux Kernel 3.7 and Android 4.2

Linaro release 12.11 has just been announced, and includes Linux Kernel 3.7-rc2 and Android 4.2. The tracking version (stable release) uses Kernel 3.4.19. This release upgrade Android to version 4.2, adds support for Origen 4 Quad board, and you can now use perf profiling utility in Linaro Android. Initial GRUB support for ARM is now available, the Ubuntu Precise server image is back online and lots of updates have been done on the kernel, mainly for Android, device tree and big.LITTLE. Here are the highlights of the release: Android Platform Enablement Android upgraded from 4.1.2 to 4.2 to all the platforms Android builds are available for Origen 4412 board setup Improvements to click-through license infrastructure MP3 playback enabled for ARM Versatile Express and Samsung Origen (4210 and 4412) Fixed riff USB issue on newer laptops Testing/LAVA Re-enabled Android CTS testing Integrated the new Methanol browser test Upstreaming Perf patch was […]

Getting Started with 64-bit ARM Development: Hello World and Linux on ARMv8 Fast Models

At the end of last year, ARM announced ARMv8, the first ARM 64-bit ARM archtecture, and last week at ARM Techcon 2012, ARM announced the first ARMv8 cores: Cortex A53 and A57. But since there’s no silicon at the moment, what if you wanted to develop code running on ARMv8 before the hardware is available? The answer is: Fast Models, a Virtual Platform (VP) to accelerate software development. This is especially important for ARMv8 since hardware is not expected to be available for another year. In this post, I’ll first show how to run “Hello World!” in ARMv8 fast models, then we’ll run ARM Linux 64-Bit (Aarch64) in the virtual platform. ARMv8 Foundation Model In order allow the developer’s community to program for ARMv8 (Cortex A53/A57 cores), ARM has made ARMv8 Foundation Model, a virtual platform, available free of charge. This v8 Foundation model provides a basic ARMv8 platform environment […]

The Yocto Project Release 1.3

The Yocto Project Release 1.3 has just been announced. This release codenamed “Danny” and based on Poky 8.0 is the fifth release of the project. The Yocto Project is a framework to assist developers in creating embedded Linux distributions. New features and updates for the Yocto Project 1.3 Improved terminal UI, which makes it easy to see the tasks that are currently executing, and avoids burying any warnings that are printed. Eliminated intermediate step when building cross compiler toolchain Relocatable SDK Large number of usability improvements in the Hob image building UI Upgraded eglibc to version 2.16 Upgraded gcc to version 4.7 Upgraded Linux kernel version to 3.4.11 Added yocto-bsp script for automating the initial parts of creating a new BSP Python functions now consistently use four spaces for indentation –  no more having to try to match the mix of tabs and spaces in your recipes Disabled sharing shared […]

Linaro 12.10 Release with Linux kernel 3.6 and Android 4.1.2

Linaro release 12.10 has recently been announced, and includes Linux Kernel 3.6.1 and Android 4.1.2. This release provides further improvement to big.LITTLE architecture and Linux can boot on TC2 (A Test Chip with 2 Cortex A15 and 3 Cortex a7 cores) and an ARMv8 (Aarch64) OpenEmbedded community build is now available for download.  Work has also be done on preparing demos for Linaro Connect (29 Oct – 02 Nov) in Copenhagen including a single ARM kernel booting on different boards. Here are the highlights of the release: Android Linaro Android 12.10 has been upgraded to 4.1.1_r6 and then to 4.1.2. Linaro Android builds are now shipped with improved instructions. AOSP Galaxy Nexus builds are available from http://android-build.linaro.org and include DS-5 support. Linaro Android toolchain has been updated to Linaro GCC 2012.10. Dalvik benchmarked against Hard-Float Open JDK and Java SE. Power meter improvements for LAVA automation. Prepared Connect demonstrations benchmarking […]

$69 – $89 Wandboard Freescale i.MX6 Solo and Dual Development Boards

The Wandboard is a low cost Linux ARM Cortex-A9 ARM board comprised of a  CPU module and an interface board. There are actually 2 versions of the board (single and dual core) which are developed by a team of engineers during their spare time: Wandboard Solo – $69 – Freescale i.MX6 Solo + 512 MB RAM Wandboard Dual – $89 – Freescale i.MX6 Dual + 1 GB RAM Both boards come with Audio I/O, Optical S/PDIF, HDMI, a camera interface, 2 micro SD cardslot, a serial port, an expansion header, USB and USB OTG ports, a SATA connector and Gb Ethernet. The dual version also adds Wifi 802.11 b/g/n and Bluetooth support. There are not so many boards with native SATA support, so for those of you who need SATA this could be really be a good option. [Update: Although there’s a SATA connector on the baseboard, this is not […]

Linaro 12.09 Release with Kernel 3.6 and Android 4.1.1

Linaro release 12.09 has just been announced, and includes Linux Kernel 3.6-rc6 and Android Jelly Bean. This release provides further improvement to Android Jelly Bean, Android benchmark characterization,  an ARMv8 OpenEmbedded image, UEFI bootloader support for Vexpress, origen and pandabords, and some improvement to big.LITTLE and power management. Here are the highlights of the release: Android All Linaro patches are now available on Jelly Bean. Accelerated graphics is now available on Snowball Jelly Bean build. AndEBench, AndEBench Java, Linpack, CaffeineMark, Antutu 2D and 3D, NBench, Quadrant, I/O Benchmark, Vellamo benchmark hotspot characterization available. An Origen tracking build is available and will be released this cycle as a Linaro Evaluation Build (LEB). Audio works on Origen running Jelly Bean (WAV file only). A Monkeyrunner script to run Streamline has been completed. First rev of the NI PXIe-4154 based power measurement system is created. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bKyuxLl4iw&feature=plcp In-tree AOSP tests have been automated. […]

15 Linaro OnAir Sessions about Android, Linux, Debugging and Software QA

Linaro has planned 15 virtual conferences between Monday, August 13 and Saturday, August 18, 2012. Those online events will deal with the work done at Linaro, including software optimization, software QA, Android and Linux kernel development, Open Embedded on ARMv8 and more. Those conferences are public and anybody can join. All times indicated below are GMT+07:00 (Bangkok), so you can either mentally convert the time (recommended), or click on the links below to get the date and time in your timezone. Exploring The Performance Impact of PGO and LTO on ARM– Mon, August 13, 5:00 PM Abstract: Profile guided and linked time optimisation (PGO and LTO) are two of GCC’s cross program optimisations that should improve both the startup and runtime of typical programs.  We know that they basically work on ARM but don’t know the potential speed up or the work involved in proper support. This session will cover […]

LinuxCon North America 2012 Schedule

LinuxCon (North America) 2012 will take place on August 29 – 31, 2012 at Sheraton Hotel & Marina, in San Diego, California. The event will be co-located with the Linux Kernel Summit, the Linux Plumbers Conference, and CloudOpen 2012. LinuxCon consists of 3 days of keynotes, business and developers related sessions as well as tutorials. There will be over 80 sessions and keynotes during those 3 days. I’ll highlight a few sessions that I find particularly interesting and related to embedded Linux, software development and ARM. August 29 10:45 – 11:30 – Life After BerkeleyDB: OpenLDAP’s Memory-Mapped Database by Howard Chu, Symas Abstract: OpenLDAP’s new MDB library is a highly optimized B+tree implementation that is orders of magnitude faster and more efficient than everything else in the software world. Reads scale perfectly linearly across arbitrarily many CPUs with no bottlenecks, and data is returned with zero memcpy’s. Writes are on […]

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