Later tonight, around 8pm EST/5pmPST/0000UTC I’ll be interviewing Deepak Saxena, Tech Lead for the Kernel Team at Linaro and Vicky Janicki, Program Director for Member Services at Linaro about the training sessions which will be offered to attendees during the Q2.12 Linaro Connect event being held at the Gold Coast Hotel in Hong Kong from 28 May through 1 June, 2012.  This interview will be live and both streamed and recorded using Google + Hangouts on Air.

We’ll be discussing the following ‘Into Training’ sessions, which are currently scheduled to take place on Monday 28 June 2012. More about the schedule can be found on the Linaro Connect schedule page.

Upstreaming 101 -In this training session Deepak, will cover the basic “Whys” and “Hows” of upstreaming. In the “Why” section, will quickly go over the reasons that working with upstream is beneficial and in the “How” section will discuss both code design choices and also low level commands used to generate upstream ready patches.

Introduction to Git – Matt Waddel, FAE and Support Engineer at Linaro, will teach attendees about Git-the distributed version control system used by developers to manage the Linux kernel. Matt will walk attendees though the basics of using Git find it in this session.

Introduction to the ARM SoC tree – In this session, Arnd Bergmann, the ARM SoC tree maintainer, gives attendees and overview of the ARM SoC Tree.

Introduction to Device Tree – In this session, Thomas Abraham, of the Linaro Kernel Working Group, will provide an overview of creating Device Tree bindings for new and existing platforms and SoCs.

Introduction to PinMux/Pin Control – For this session, Linus Walleij, Kernel Engineer at Linaro, will discuss how to develop a driver and give an over view of the API.

So if you want to hear more about what attendees can look forward to during these sessions, which we will try to stream live via hangouts on air during the Connect event,  but which will be recorded and made available on the Connect Website after the event, then you can view the interview via my Google+ Page or my Youtube Channel starting tonight, Wednesday, May 16, 2012 at 8pm EST/5PM PST/0000 UTC.

Launchpad.net passed one of those interesting milestones with Bug #1000000 today. Ok, so it's interesting for us who like base-10, for you power of 2 types, you'll have to wait around until Bug #1073741824.

Putting aside the interesting number, let's use it as a reminder of the amazing participation by the community in not only the Ubuntu project, but all the other projects (including many of my favorites at Linaro) that are hosted on on Launchpad.  Thanks to all the tireless testing and bug tracking/fixing by this entire community, all of these projects are better off.  Also, it should serve as a reminder that we should persevere and push even harder to find all those issues still waiting to be discovered so we can get them fixed, and further increase the quality of Ubuntu and others.  Finally, thanks to the Launchpad team for their efforts in producing and maintaining this service that is useful to so many of us.

In this age of 3d accelerated desktops and all that fancy stuff, one does not expect practical innovation happening in the remote terminal emulation area. But it has just happened. It is called Mosh, a shorthand for "Mobile Shell".

What does it do better than ssh we have learned to love?

• Less lag! Being UDP based, it is not prone to TCP congestion effects. Considering that voip, games and everything else latency critical has been UDP based, it is (almost) surprising that it wasn't done for interactive terminals before...
• Even less lag! Mosh provides local echo and line editing when the other side is not being responsive. To do this, mosh actually becomes a terminal emulator of it's own. This stuff is sweet on unstable 3G and conference wifi networks.
• Survives suspending. Resume your laptop and *bam* all your remote mutt and vim editors are still there instead of the "connection reset" you get from ssh.
• Roaming. Got another IP? Moved from wifi to ethernet to 3G? your sessions are still open! Another thing a TCP based protocol couldn't do easily...

It doesn't replace ssh, as it still borrows authentication from ssh. But that's cool, as you can keep your ssh authorized keys.

Available in Debian unstable,testing and Backports today, and many other systems as well. Hopefully an Android client comes available soon, as the above mentioned advantages seem really tailored for android like mobile systems.

Caveat: This is new stuff, and thus hasn't quite been proven to be secure.

Linaro’s work affects many segments other than mobile – cars, TV, cameras, kiosks, printers, consumer and enterprise routers, servers – the market for Linux on ARM extends to billions of devices. The ARM architecture and business model encourages SoC vendors … Continue reading →

This week I’m proudly participating at the Ubuntu Developer Summit to help planning and defining what will the Quantal Quetzal (12.10) release be in the next following months.

As usual I’m wearing not only the Linaro hat, but also my Ubuntu and Canonical ones, interested and participating actively at most topics that are related with ARM in general.

And what can I say after the first 3 days at UDS-Q? Well, busy as never before and with great opportunities to help getting Ubuntu to rock even more at ARM, with current devices/platforms and with the exciting new ones that will be coming in the next few months.

Here are a few highlights from the first days:

Monday – May 7th

• Introduction and Keynote
  • Great start as usual by Mark, showing the great opportunities for both Canonical and Ubuntu, describing the new target and use cases, and also showing how important Cloud is now for Ubuntu. After that we had, finally, the announcement of a real hardware availability from Calxeda, proving that ARM server are indeed real! (which is a quite important accomplishment)
• Schedule displays all working with our member’s boards
  • This was the first time that all the schedule displays available at UDS were all covered by the ARM boards provided by Linaro. This time we got Pandaboard, Origen and also Snowball constantly showing the schedule through all the day. Low power and powerful devices all around
• Plans for a minimum filesystem for embedded devices
  • Discussion to cover all the possible embedded related use cases for Ubuntu, and trying to understand the real requirements for a minimum filesystem (rootfs) for those devices. While we didn’t decide to generate the smallest-still-apt/dpkg-compatible rootfs for our users (as ubuntu-core is already covering most of the cases), we’ll provide enough tools and documentation on how to easily generate them. At Linaro side the Ubuntu Nano image should probably reflect such suggestions.
• Identify impact of the switch to pure live images for ARM platforms
  • Here the focus was basically to review and understand if we would really continue providing pre-installed based images instead of just supporting live based ones. Having the images provided only at the SD cards are very useful to make the bootstrap and install quite easy, but it hurts badly the performance. As we’re now getting ARM boards that are very powerful in many ways, the I/O bound shouldn’t limit what the users would be able to get from them. The decision for Quantal is to drop support for the pre-installed images, and provide live based ones at the SD cards (think like the live-sd image as we have with CD on other archs), where the user would install Ubuntu the same way as done with x86, and using USB/Sata based devices as rootfs by default.
• OpenStack Deployment on ARM Server
  • The focus of this session was basically to better understand what might be the missing pieces for a proper OpenStack support at ARM. Quite a few open questions still, but the missing pkgs enablement, LXC testing and support and KVM for a few platforms will help making sure the support is at least correctly in place. After initial support, continuous test and validation should happen to make sure the ARM platforms keeps well supported over the time (which will be better stressed and tested once MAAS/Juju is also supported properly at ARM).

Tuesday – May 8th

• Detail and begin the arm64/aarch64 port in Ubuntu
  • Clearly the most important session of the day for ARM. Great discussion on how to prepare and start the ARMv8 port at Ubuntu and Debian, by starting with cross-build support with multiarch and later support with Fast Models and Qemu. A lot is still to be covered once ARM is able to publish the ARMv8 support for Toolchain and Kernel, and session will be reviewed again at Linaro Connect at the end of this month.
• Ubuntu Kernel Delta Review
  • Usual review of the patches the Ubuntu Kernel team is maintaining at the Ubuntu Kernel tree. At Linaro this is important as we also enable the Ubuntu specific patch-set at the packages provided by the LEB, for proper kernel and user-space support. Luckily this time it seems the delta is really minimum, which should probably also start to be part of Linux Linaro in the following month.
• Integrate Linaro hwpacks for ARM with the Ubuntu image build infrastructure
  • Usual discussion about trying to avoid replicated work that is strictly related with each ARM board we support at both Ubuntu and Linaro. Decision is to finally sync with the latest flash-kernel available at Debian and try to get the common project/package with the hardware specific bits in place, so it can be used by linaro-image-tools, flash-kernel and debian-cd.

Wednesday – May 9th

• MAAS Next Steps
  • Session to review and plan what are the next steps for the MAAS project, which is also missing proper ARM support for now. Great discussions on understanding all the requirements, as they will not necessarily match entirely with the usual ARM devices we have at the moment. Here the goal for ARM is to continue improving the PXE support at U-Boot (even with UEFI chainload later), and understanding what might be missing to also have IPMI support (even if not entirely provided by the hardware).
• System Compositor
  • Great session covering what might be the improvements and development on the graphics side for next release. Goal is to use a system compositor that would be started right at the beginning at the boot, which will then be controlled and used properly once lightdm is up (with X11). This will improve a lot the user experience on normal x86 based desktops, and luckily on ARM we’re also in a quite nice situation with the work done by Linaro helping getting the proper DRM/KMS support for the boards we support, so I hope ARM will be in a great shape here
• ARM Server general enhancements (for ARMv7 and perhaps v8)
  • At this session we could cover what seems to be the most recurrent and problematically thing at supporting ARM servers, which is the lack of a single and supported boot method and boot loader. UEFI should be able to help on this front soon, but until then the focus will be to keep checking and making sure the current PXE implementation at u-boot works as expected (chainloading UEFI on u-boot is also another possibility Linaro is investigating). There is also the request for IPMI support, which is still unclear in general how it’ll be done generically speaking.
• Integration testing for the bootloader
  • As Ubuntu is also moving to the direction of continuous validating and testing all important components available, there’s the need for a proper validation of the bootloader, and the effect at the user experience while booting the system. For ARM it’s also a special case, as U-Boot is still the main bootloader used across the boards. Test case descriptions in place, and discussion will probably continue at Linaro Connect as this is also an area where we also want to help validating/testing.
• ARM Server Benchmarking and Performance
  • Here the Ubuntu Server Team presented how they are benchmarking and checking performance at the server level at x86, and covering what might still be needed to run and validate the ARM boards the same way. For ARM the plan is to run the same test cases on the available scenarios, and also try to get Linaro involved by making sure this is also part of the continuous validation and testing done with LAVA. Another important topic that will probably be extended at Linaro Connect is finding a way to get the power consumption data when running the test cases/benchmarks, so it can be further optimised later on.
• Compiz GLES2 Handover
  • Last session of the day, trying to find the missing gaps to finally get the OpenGL ES2.0 support merged at the Compiz and Unity upstream branches used by the entire Ubuntu desktop (across all archs). Following work and actions will basically be to fix the remaining and important plugins after merging the changes, and also getting a few test cases to properly validate the support at Ubuntu. Once all done, it should be merged ASAP.

These are just a few topics which I was able to participate. There are a lot of more exciting work coming on, which can all be found at http://summit.ubuntu.com/uds-q/. Remember that you’re still able to participate in a few of them tomorrow and friday, as remote access is provided for all the sessions we have.

I’m sure a lot of more exciting stuff will be discussed for ARM support until the end of this week, and at Linaro Connect, at the end of the month, we’ll be able to review and get our hands dirty as well

Exciting times for ARM!

During my stay in Oakland, CA (due to Ubuntu Developer Summit) I decided to attend also Tizen Developers Conference. Not that I have any relations with this platform — just wanted to meet some friends from Maemo times. And I did not had plans for Tuesday evening while Tizen visitors had social event planned in The California Academy of Sciences.

For those which do not know what Tizen is a bit of history. Years ago Nokia made few internet tablet devices (770, n800, n810) and phone (n900) which were running Linux distribution named Maemo. It was loosely based on Debian. In meantime Intel created Moblin which was their distribution for mobile devices. Few years passed and they joined forces and MeeGo was born. Nokia released N9 phone with it, ASUS had netbook running MeeGo and maybe few other devices appeared on market. Then history repeated: MeeGo merged with LiMo and they created Tizen project.

It is hard to tell was conference success or not because I did not attended any sessions there — just opening keynote by Jim Zemlin. On first day I also came for technical showcase and partner demos. But they were squeezed in very small room so it was hard to discuss with people showing their work. Maybe next time organizers will give at least 4m² per demo — this should be a minimum.

But today I got Tizen Developer Platform device and thumbdrive with SDK on it. So decided to play a bit with it. It was not enjoyable experience.

First ugly part was Tizen SDK “so-called” installer. 823MB shell script… I thought that those times passed long time ago. Anyway tried to run it. All I got was message that 64bits systems are not supported. Good to know that, but my x86-64 systems are able to run x86 binaries without problems. Ok, I made workaround and then got message about missing qemu, rpm, libsdl packages. No, I will not install rpm on my Ubuntu systems.

So I decided to cut that crappy shell script and take a look at tarball. Fast “tail -n+122 tizen-sdk-0423.bin >tizen-sdk.tar.gz” and I was able to extract SDK. Got 26 zip archives.

One of them contains rootfs created from packages based on Debian/Ubuntu packages. Some are from times when dinosaurs ruled the Earth (debianutils 2.17 was released in 2006), some are more fresh (like gcc-4.5 based on version from May 2011). In other words tradition started by Maemo is continued in Tizen and developers are given mix of fresh tools with long time forgotten ones. And Scratchbox 2.

To connect with device there is “sdb” tool. It introduces itself as “Smart Development Bridge” but in past it was named “Samsung Development Bridge” (run ‘strings’ on binary). And it’s father has a name “Android Development Bridge” and has some more options.

Anyway if you want to connect to device then few steps are required:

1. On device go to settings and set USB to ‘USB debugging’ mode. This will switch it into cdc_ether gadget.
2. On host do “sudo ifconfig usb0 192.168.129.1″ to configure networking.
3. Connect to device: “ssh root@192.168.129.3″

And then you can enjoy system which is a mixture of few Debian/Ubuntu versions. And forget about updates — unless you know how to get to 165.213.180.233 and know password of “kb0929.kim” user there (taken from /etc/apt/sources.list file).

Device uses Linux 2.6.36 kernel with unknown patches on top including CMA and Android ones. Quite old one but works. Hope to get newer one from someone.

What I do not like is availability of sources. There is review.tizen.org website with git repositories but I want to vomit when I see commits like “let’s add 2.6.36 kernel in one commit”. Lovely lack of ideas how to help developers.

What I will do with device? Not decided yet. Waiting for instructions how to get into bootloader to boot own kernels. Then who knows… replacing Tizen with Android or Ubuntu?

---

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz
Tizen: first impressions was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

Another May, another Ubuntu Developers Summit. This time I am in Oakland, California, USA (even if my tweets shows Dallas, Texas as geolocation).

As usual with US trips this one took insane amount of time. But I was 3cm from not going here… Why? Because I got stuck in toilet at home. Hopefully with help from neighbour I was able to bash door out and get to the bus stop on time.

Then standard set of bus, plane, plane, train and finally arrived in hotel. As my room was not yet ready I got 30$ coupon to bar to not waste time on waiting. Free meal/beer ;)

My room is at 17th floor (which means 15th) and has a nice view in the evening:

On Sunday I went to see San Francisco centre (I saw Golden Gate on earlier visit). Chinatown was interesting experience. Lot of people speaking language which I do not understand, shops full of food which I do not recognize.

Some random photos:

After getting some souvenirs and refilling of my US T-Mobile sim card I decided to go to the cinema for ‘The Avengers’ movie. It was nice experience. Touchscreen operated ticket machines which allow to buy ticket in one minute (but people were standing in long queue to buy tickets in ‘normal way’) made it even better. As in Poland there was big amount of commercials before movie (including some in style “our Army/Navy is great, why not join us”) but what I liked was just-before-movie animation reminding about not talking/texting/tweeting during movie (made with characters from “Madagaskar” series). Have to admit that RealD 3D glasses were more comfortable than Dolby 3D ones used by Polish cinemas. Movie itself was great but I think that will have to see it in Poland due to my English ;D

During evening there was usual Canonical internal plenary and then dinner. I even managed to sleep 6 hours despite jet lag ;D

Monday started with interesting keynote and presentation of Calxeda ARM server using technology they were talking about at previous UDS. Photos:

It is 2U case with 24 Serial-ATA discs and 12 nodes with 4 quad-core EnergyCore processors per node. The only cables inside are power ones as rest of connections is on pcb. Connection with world by four Ethernet connectors.

I went to “Create filesystems for embedded devices” session where we discussed how to make Ubuntu Core even smaller. People mentioned OpenEmbedded, OpenWRT, buildroot as usual, we got some strange use cases too. What will come from it? Time will show.

Plenaries were interesting. First Chris Kenyon told about cooperation with OEMs and ODMs and how it relates with Ubuntu. Laptop in a pizza box picture was nice — reminded developer boards. Then Bdale Garbee from HP shown us that there is no way to go though life without being served by HP technologies or hardware. Both talks were great and I hope that rest of plenaries will be like that.

After plenaries I went to San Francisco to register at Tizen conference and to meet some friends from Maemo times. Technical showcase and partner demos were boring and it was hard to feel that it is something innovative. But who knows… maybe Tizen will be yet another phone/tablet/ivi/etc OS even when Moblin, Maemo, MeeGo did not succeed.

During evening (back at UDS) there was ‘Meet & greet” social event. Our Linaro group (Amber, Ricardo, Paul, me) was showing member boards and replying to misc questions from audience.

What next? Sessions, social events, discussions about my patches with other developers, some sight-seeing.

---

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz
UDS-Q was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

No, I promise, it’s not a Last-day-of-April-Fools joke. Linaro Android, built with the Linaro toolchain (my test build was done with the gcc 4.7 based 2012.04 Android toolchain release), can run on a Galaxy Nexus phones (GSM version tested, CDMA … Continue reading →

Cross Compiling with MultiArch

Congrats to the Ubuntu Folk for the new LTS release. Incidentally this is also the first release where our work on MultiArch bears fruit. We can now cross-compile relatively easily without resorting to hacks like scratchbox, qemu chroot or dpkg-cross/xdeb.

Lets show short practical guide on cross-building Qemu for armhf. The instructions refer to precise, but the goodiness is on the way to Debian as well. Biggest missing piece being the cross-compiler packages, which we have an Summer of Code project. The example is operated in a chroot to avoid potentially messing up your working machine. Qemu-linaro is not a shining example, as cross-building it doesn't work out of box. But that is educational, it allows me to show what kind of issues you can bump into, and how to fix them.

 $ sudo debootstrap --variant=buildd precise /srv/precise

Edit the /srv/precise/etc/apt.sources.list to the following (replace amd64 with i386 if you made an i386 chroot)

deb [arch=amd64] http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise main universe
deb [arch=armhf] http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports precise main universe
deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise main universe

Edit the /srv/precise/etc/dpkg/dpkg.cfg.d/multiarch by adding the following line:

foreign-architecture armhf

Finally disable install of recommends by editing /srv/precise/etc/apt/apt.conf.d/10local:

APT::Install-Recommends "0";
APT::Install-Suggests "0";

Install the armhf crosscompiler the chroot

 $ sudo chroot /srv/precise/
 # unset LANG LANGUAGE
 # mount -t proc proc /proc
 # apt-get update
 # apt-get install g++-arm-linux-gnueabihf pkg-config-arm-linux-gnueabihf

Get the sources and try to install the cross-buildeps:

 # cd /tmp
 # apt-get source qemu-linaro
 # cd qemu-linaro-*
 # apt-get build-dep -aarmhf qemu-linaro

As we see, the build-dep bombs out ugly, with a them of "perl" being unable to be installed. This is because apt-get can't figure out if we should install and armhf or amd64 version of perl. We don't use the required syntax yet in Build-Dep line, "perl:any", as dpkg and apt in previous released don't support it. Thus back porting would no longer be possible. One way to fix it, would be to drop perl build-dep, as perl is already pulled by other build-deps. But lets instead show howto install it the build-deps manually. First we build system build-deps, then target architecture ones:

 # apt-get install debhelper texinfo
 # apt-get install zlib1g-dev:armhf libasound2-dev:armhf libsdl1.2-dev:armhf libx11-dev:armhf libpulse-dev:armhf libncurses5-dev:armhf libbrlapi-dev:armhf libcurl4-gnutls-dev:armhf libgnutls-dev:armhf libsasl2-dev:armhf uuid-dev:armhf libvdeplug2-dev:armhf libbluetooth-dev:armhf

And try the build[1]:

 # dpkg-buildpackage -aarmhf -B

Which sadly errors out. Turns out the cross-build support in debian/rules is broken. Instead of --cc we need to feed an --cross-prefix to the ./configure of qemu. Edit the debian/rules with replacing

-  conf_arch += --cc=$(DEB_HOST_GNU_TYPE)-gcc --cpu=$(QEMU_CPU)
+  conf_arch += --cross-prefix=$(DEB_HOST_GNU_TYPE)-

Optional: Since we are cross-compiling from a multicore machine, lets also add parallel building support, by changing the override_dh_auto_build: rule to have --parallel flags in debian/rules as well:

override_dh_auto_build:
        # system build
        dh_auto_build -B system-build --parallel
ifeq ($(DEB_HOST_ARCH_OS),linux)
        # user build
        dh_auto_build -B user-build --parallel

        # static user build
        dh_auto_build -B user-static-build --parallel

Try the build again:

 # export DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=parallel=4 # I have dual-core hyperthreading machine, build with all four threads
 # time dpkg-buildpackage -aarmhf -B
 ...
dpkg-buildpackage: binary only upload (no source included)

real    18m53.425s
user    65m42.570s
sys     2m50.383s

The Native build of qemu-linaro took 4h 11min.

[1] You should not build as root - but to keep instructions short, I'm not explaining howto add and use a unprivileged user in a chroot. Do as I *say*, not as I *do*!

Any fool can make something complicated. It takes a genius to make it simple.

– Woody Guthrie

Interview Ubuntu Server and Community Team Members about MAAS and more

I had the opportunity interview Dave Walker, Jorge Castro, Francis Locaste, and Matt Revell about all things Ubuntu Server and Cloud (ok maybe not *all* things, but some really cool stuff); especially MAAS or “Metal As A Service”, AWSOME or “Any Web Service Over Me”, juju and more via Google+Hangouts on Air. You can check out the video here.

It was a fun hour, for me anyway, complete with a MAAS demo, explanations, how to get involved, and where to send your feedback on these topics.

Plus you get to catch a glimpse of the personalities behind MAAS, juju and AWSOME as well as what they personally like about what they are doing, and what the future of these projects look like. It’s AWESOME (pun intended!)

In this interview you’ll find out all that and more.

Below are the links and topics discussed, however if you want to see the MAAS demo, and see what Dave, Jorge, Francis, and Matt had to say then the video is a must see.

MAAS – Metal as a Service

Mark Shuttleworth’s Blog Post on MAAS – http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1103

MAAS Wiki – https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ServerTeam/MAAS

MAAS Launchpad Project – https://launchpad.net/maas

MAAS Launchpad Team – https://launchpad.net/~maas-maintainers

Jorge Castro’s Blog Post on MAAS – http://www.jorgecastro.org/2012/04/04/getting-started-with-maas/

MAAS Mailing List – https://launchpad.net/~maas-devel

MAAS announcement on Canonical site - http://www.canonical.com/content/%E2%80%9Cmetal-service%E2%80%9D-provisioning…

Juju

Juju Wiki – https://juju.ubuntu.com/

Project Site (Launchpad) – https://launchpad.net/juju

Charms – https://juju.ubuntu.com/Charms

Mailing List – https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/juju

IRC (freenode) – #juju

AWSOME – Any Web Service over Me

Awesome Stacking – http://www.ubuntu.com/cloud/private-cloud/awsome

Launchpad – https://launchpad.net/openstack

Ubuntu Server and Cloud Information

Website - http://cloud.ubuntu.com/

Wiki Page – https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ServerTeam

Mailing Lists – https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/Ubuntu-cloud, https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/Ubuntu-cloud-announce, https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-server

IRC (freenode) – #ubuntu-cloud and #ubuntu-server

Launchpad – https://launchpad.net/openstack and https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-server

“Your talent determines what you can do. Your motivation determines how much you are willing to do. Your attitude determines how well you do it.” ~Lou Holtz We are pleased to announce the release of Linaro 12.04. The Linaro 12.04 … Continue reading →

"Your talent determines what you can do. Your motivation determines how
much you are willing to do. Your attitude determines how well you do it."
 ~Lou Holtz

We are pleased to announce the release of Linaro 12.04.

The Linaro 12.04 release highlights the precision, expertise and talent
which all of the Linaro Teams – Working Groups, Landing Teams and
Platform Teams – use to deliver influential updates and stimulating new
features that are integrated on top of Android and Ubuntu. We, together
with our members, partners and community continue to build upon the
future of Linux on ARM and the 12.04 release is one more step in the
excellent execution of those plans.

"This release integrates the ARM Fast Models. Using Fast Models enables
us to engineer and test architectural features well before production
silicon chips are available from our members. The most recent major
project that is seeing the benefit of this is our work with big.LITTLE
integrated kernel switching and KVM (using the Cortex-A15's
virtualization mode)" said Linaro CTO David A Rusling, "these
cycle-accurate architectural models are essential in our mission to
avoid fragmentation and accelerate our member's time to market."

During the Linaro 12.04 release cycle the Developer Platform Team
migrated the Linaro Evaluation Builds (LEB) to the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS
(Precise Pangolin) based images. These new images are built for the ARM
hard float (armhf) images and Linaro U-Boot is now based on the latest
upstream release – v2012.04.1. Additionally, the Developer Platform
images now provide support for the big.LITTLE integrated switcher and
A15 Fast Models with KVM kernel, as well as testing coverage of
the big.LITTLE project for both the reference and integrated switcher.

The Linaro Android team delivered the multimedia enablement for the
Snowball and have updated all builds to AOSP ICS 4.0.4_r1.1. Also
included as of this cycle are updated base toolchain components – MPFR
and GMP. The Linaro Android Team ported stressapptest to Android for
big.LITTLE testing and like the Developer Platform team implemented and
ran weekly big.LITTLE tests.

The Infrastructure, Graphics, Kernel, Multimedia, Toolchain, and
Validation teams all had updates and new features added into this
release which are covered in more detail on the release wiki.

We encourage everybody to use the 12.04 release. The download links for
all images and components are available on our downloads page:

http://www.linaro.org/downloads/

See the detailed highlights of this release to get an overview of what
has been accomplished by the Working Groups, Landing Teams and Platform
Teams. The release details are linked from the “Details” column for
each released artifact on the release information:

http://wiki.linaro.org/Cycles/1204/Release#Release_Information

Using the Android-based images
=======================

The Android-based images come in three parts: system, userdata and boot.
These need to be combined to form a complete Android install. For an
explanation of how to do this please see:

http://wiki.linaro.org/Platform/Android/ImageInstallation

If you are interested in getting the source and building these images
yourself please see the following pages:

http://wiki.linaro.org/Platform/Android/GetSource
http://wiki.linaro.org/Platform/Android/BuildSource

Using the Ubuntu-based images
=======================

The Ubuntu-based images consist of two parts. The first part is a hardware
pack, which can be found under the hwpacks directory and contains hardware
specific packages (such as the kernel and bootloader). The second part is
the rootfs, which is combined with the hardware pack to create a complete
image. For more information on how to create an image please see:

http://wiki.linaro.org/Platform/DevPlatform/Ubuntu/ImageInstallation

Getting involved
============

More information on Linaro can be found on our websites:

* Homepage: http://www.linaro.org
* Wiki: http://wiki.linaro.org

Also subscribe to the important Linaro mailing lists and join our IRC
channels to stay on top of Linaro developments:

* Announcements:
http://lists.linaro.org/mailman/listinfo/linaro-announce

* Development:
http://lists.linaro.org/mailman/listinfo/linaro-dev

* IRC:
#linaro on irc.linaro.org or irc.freenode.net
#linaro-android irc.linaro.org or irc.freenode.net

Known issues with this release
=====================

For any errata issues, please see:

http://wiki.linaro.org/Cycles/1204/Release#Known_Issues

Bug reports for this release should be filed in Launchpad against the
individual packages that are affected. If a suitable package cannot be
identified, feel free to assign them to:

http://www.launchpad.net/linaro

The Linaro Toolchain Working Group is pleased to announce the 2012.04 release of the Linaro Toolchain Binaries, a pre-built version of Linaro GCC and Linaro GDB that runs on generic Linux or Windows and targets the glibc Linaro Evaluation Build. Uses … Continue reading →

The Linaro Toolchain Working Group is pleased to announce the 2012.04
release of the Linaro Toolchain Binaries, a pre-built version of
Linaro GCC and Linaro GDB that runs on generic Linux or Windows and
targets the glibc Linaro Evaluation Build.

Uses include:
 * Cross compiling ARM applications from your laptop
 * Remote debugging
 * Build the Linux kernel for your board

What's included:
 * Linaro GCC 4.7 2012.04
 * Linaro GDB 7.4 2012.04
 * A statically linked gdbserver
 * A system root
 * Manuals under share/doc/

The system root contains the basic header files and libraries to link
your programs against.

Interesting changes include:
 * Switches to the new GCC 4.7 based Linaro GCC
 * Adds native language support to most of the programs
 * Adds the mudflap, ssp, and gomp runtime libraries
 * Enables gnu_unique_object support in GCC

Please see the README about running 4.7 based programs on a system
with 4.6 based runtime libraries.

The Linux version is supported on Ubuntu 10.04.3 and 11.10, Debian
6.0.2, Fedora 16, openSUSE 12.1, Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation
5.7 and later, and should run on any Linux Standard Base 3.0
compatible distribution. Please see the README about running on
x86_64 hosts.

The Windows version is supported on Windows XP Pro SP3, Windows Vista
Business SP2, and Windows 7 Pro SP1.

The binaries and build scripts are available from:
 https://launchpad.net/linaro-toolchain-binaries/trunk/2012.04

Need help? Ask a question on https://ask.linaro.org/

Already on Launchpad? Submit a bug at
https://bugs.launchpad.net/linaro-toolchain-binaries

On IRC? See us on #linaro on Freenode.

Other ways that you can contact us or get involved are listed at
https://wiki.linaro.org/GettingInvolved.

We use QEMU to test programs built by the toolchain binary release for correctness. I’ve written up the instructions for spinning up your own at:

https://wiki.linaro.org/MichaelHope/Sandbox/QEMUCrossTest.

It’s focused on simplicity – getting a running, SSH only Cortex-A9 up and going as soon as possible. It’s not the latest, not graphical, and doesn’t replace the deeper documentation at:

https://wiki.linaro.org/Resources/HowTo/Qemu

Multimedia HW Acceleration from Origen In 12.03 release, Origen has a fully enabled Multimedia components with HW acceleration, this includes: 3D HW, Multimedia Video Playback and HDMI for Graphics and Video. This gives an invigorating user experience. The kernel version … Continue reading →

Linaro Events Manager, Arwen Donaghey, issued the Call for Participation for Q2.12 Linaro Connect Demo Friday event, in an email to the connect mailing list yesterday. Below is the Call for Participation in full: Linaro Connect Q2.12 is just around the … Continue reading →

The Linaro Toolchain Working Group is pleased to announce the release of Linaro GDB 7.4 2012.04. Linaro GDB 7.4 2012.04 is the second release in the 7.4 series. Based off the latest GDB 7.4, it includes a number of ARM-focused … Continue reading →

The Linaro Toolchain Working Group is pleased to announce the release of Linaro GDB 7.4 2012.04.

Linaro GDB 7.4 2012.04 is the second release in the 7.4 series. Based off the latest GDB 7.4, it includes a number of ARM-focused bug fixes and enhancements.

Interesting changes include:
 * gdbserver can now be compiled with Android's toolchain.
 * Additional fixes from the GDB 7.4 branch, one of them being that it doesn't require makeinfo to build anymore.

The source tarball is available at:
 https://launchpad.net/gdb-linaro/+milestone/7.4-2012.04

More information on Linaro GDB is available at:
 https://launchpad.net/gdb-linaro