Category: Linaro Connect

Keynote: Fujitsu A64fx and Fugaku – A Game Changing, HPC AI Optimized Arm CPU

Posted by – November 2, 2019

Fugaku is the flagship next generation national supercomputer being developed by Riken R-CCS and Fujitsu in collaboration https://www.r-ccs.riken.jp/en/postk/project Fugaku will have hyperscale datacenter class resource in a single exascale machine, with more than 150,000 nodes of sever-class Fujitsu A64fx many-core Arm CPUs with the new SVE (Scalable Vector Extension) with low precision math for the first time in the world, accelerating both HPC and AI workloads, augmented with HBM2 memory paired with each CPU, exhibiting nearly a Terabyte/s memory bandwidth for both HPC and AI rapid data movements. A64fx has demonstrated up to 8 times the performance of mainstream “Platinum” server processors for HPC workloads, and this game-changing performance has been realized through extensive co-design process involving the entire Japanese HPC community resulting in a highly HPC-optimzed CPU architecture. Fugaku also will likely to be the premier big data and AI/ML infrastructure; currently, we are conducting research to scale deep learning to more than 100,000 nodes on Fugaku, where we expect to obtain near top GPU-class performance on each node. The talk will give an overview of A64fx/Fugaku as well as cover some of the software ecosystem efforts to enable high-end HPC / BD / AI.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9605xIHdew

Shiratech 96Boards Sandwich = Dragonboard 410c + LTE Mezzanine + Bosch Sensor + FPGA Mezzanine


Shiratech and Arrow 96boards Mezzanine sandwich features the DragonBoard 410c with 3 mezzanines and an arduino shield with the DragonBoard 410c as the base board, a Shiratech LTE Mezzanine, a Bosch Sensor Mezzanine and a Shiratech FPGA Mezzanine.

Thea Aldrich, Zephyr Project Evangelist and Developer Advocate

Posted by – March 24, 2019

Interview with Thea Aldrich at Linaro Connect talking about Project Zephyr the open source project for the embedded world. You can read more about her at https://www.zephyrproject.org/meet-thea-aldrich/

Open Source Android Kernels with Todd Kjos of Google and Bero


Todd Kjos of the Android Kernel team at Google, and Bero of the Linaro Mobile Group, talk at Linaro Connect Vancouver, they talk about running Android on the mainline kernel, trying to get closer to mainline, enabling test boards and devices to run mainline Linux. Getting some of the Android specific things that were kept out of the tree into the Linux tree.

Chromium OS on Snapdragon 845


At Linaro Connect Vancouver 2018, some engineers are showing the Open Source Chromium OS running on the 10nm Qualcomm Snapdragon 845. With some talk on the status of using Freedreno for hardware accelerated GPU support in that Chromium OS demo. Over the past few months this solution has been upstreamed into the mainline kernel, display driver, audio driver, wifi driver, all the connectivity and periferal storage drivers, all to make Chromium OS work on that chipset. Running the 4.18 kernel with very few additional patches, it has hardware accelerated video playback using the open source freedreno driver. This could be a clue towards what I think could be an ultimate ARM Powered Laptop, a Snapdragon 845 Powered Chromebook would be so awesome, with Gigabit LTE, with good ARM single thread and multi-thread performance, with smooth Android and Linux apps supported, perhaps even it would be nice if Microsoft could contribute full x86 and ARM compiled Windows 10 apps support directly on this device.

Ultra96 Xilinx FPGA Development Board with Avnet

Posted by – November 25, 2018

Ultra96 is an ARM-based, Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC development board based on the Linaro 96Boards Consumer Edition specification. The processor is a Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ MP ZU3EG A484 and the RAM is a Micron LPDDR4 memory provides 2GB of RAM in a 512M x 32 configuration. The Ultra96 includes 40-pin 1x 96Boards Low-speed expansion header and 1x 60-pin 96Boards High speed expansion header. The 96Boards’ specifications are open and define a standard board layout for development platforms that can be used by software application, hardware device, kernel, and other system software developers. Ultra96 represents a unique position in the 96Boards community with a wide range of potential peripherals and acceleration engines in the programmable logic that is not available from other offerings.

Shiratech Hackathon at Linaro Connect Vancouver 2018

Posted by – November 25, 2018

Shiratech is an Israeli company that creates development boards. Shiratech produces ARM system on modules that cut time to market significantly and reduce project development risk. Shiratech has several new platforms launching soon.

Jilayne Lovejoy, Open Source Attorney at SPDX

Posted by – November 25, 2018

Open source technology enables collaboration between projects, but also runs into hurdles with intellectual property and has lawyers to protect it. Jilayne Lovejoy is an internationally recognized lawyer that specializes in open source technologies. Jilayne has a legal background in intellectual property. Jilayne co-leads the Software Package Data Exchange (SPDX) legal team, maintains the SPDX License List, and was a founding member of the OpenChain project.

Shuah Khan, Samsung Open Source

Posted by – November 25, 2018

Shua Khan is an experience Linux Kernel developer who works for Samsung Research America. Shua Khan maintains Kernel Selftest framework, USB over IP driver, and cpupower. Shua Khan also contributes IOMMU, and DMA areas. Shua Khan also publishes articles for Samsung opensource blog at https://s-opensource.org

Andrea Gallo, Linaro VP talks open AI with ARM at Linaro Connect Vancouver 2018

Posted by – November 21, 2018

Andrea Gallo is VP of the Segment Groups and strategic initiatives at Linaro. The current project he is working on is machine learning for the ARM ecosystem through. These efforts can help reduce fragmentation and forking for open source projects related to deep learning and neural networks. Deep learning, neural networks, and artificial intelligence enable richer more powerful applications on mobile and embedded.

Grant Likely talks EBBR bootloader for ARM

Posted by – November 21, 2018

Grant likely is a Senior Software Developer at ARM and a developer for the EBBR project https://github.com/ARM-software/ebbr. The EBBR or Embedded Base Boot Requirements is a specification for bootloaders for ARM based devices. This specification would enable arm based devices to share the same bootloader thus reducing development costs. This would enable the same OS to more easily boot on multiple devices

Shiratech shows LTE, NB-IoT, FPGA, Bosch sensors Mezzanine boards for 96Boards

Posted by – November 21, 2018

Shiratech produces ARM system on modules that cut time to market significantly and reduce project development risk. The Mezzanine board by shiratech is a dev board that provides LTE connectivity and can be connected to an arduino or Raspberry Pi. The SPECIFICATIONS are MAX-10 10M04: 256 FPGA package, 4K Logic Elements, 189Kb Block memory, Up to 156KB user FLASH memory, Dual internal configuration, and 178 GPIO FPGA programming using Altera standard programming connector.

Koen Kooi, talks Kodi, Yocto at Linaro Connect Vancouver 2018

Posted by – November 21, 2018

Koen Kooi is a release manager at Linaro, developer on the Angstrom project, contributor to the Kodi project, demonstrating Kodi running on a lot of different development boards at Linaro Demo Friday here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wipB2_6OKus One of his projects is video playback using accelerated decoding. This accelerated playback can be used in Kodi as well as in HTML5 and web video playback.

Arrow shows latest 96Boards and Mezzannine boards


Arrow shows some of their latest 96Boards and Mezzanine boards such as the Renesas ANT96 board based on the Renesas RZ Family Renesas RZ/G1E processor featuring a dual-core Arm Cortex-A7. Novtech Meerkat i.MX7D and Chameleon Cyclone V Altera/Intel FPGA board. NextBiometrics NB-2023-S fingerprint sensor mezzanine board, STM32 Sensor mezzanine board and more. Arrow has more than 5 Mezzanine boards in the pipeline and at least 2 base boards too. Oxalis Layerscape LS1012A.

Stuart Monteith of Linaro on OpenJDK, Java Development Kit and Virtualization

Posted by – November 21, 2018
Category: Linaro Connect

OpenJDk is a free and opensource implementation of of Java SE (Standard Edition). OpenJDK provides a browser VM, and Java code compiler. OpenJDK is available on most operating systems and is supported by several major companies.

Marcelo Knörich Zuffo of the University of San Paolo in Brazil at Linaro Connect Vancouver 2018

Posted by – November 21, 2018

Marcelo Knörich Zuffo is a professor of the Electronic Systems Engineering Department of the Polytechnic School of the University of San Paolo in Brazil. He teaches people how to design electronics and has projects going on such as drones using development boards such as the 96Boards platform. He also teaches PCB design. His particular specialty is autonomous drones that don’t require human control. He uses boards from 96boards.

James Bottomley of IBM talks ARM vs x86, Power, Linux containers at Linaro Connect Vancouver 2018

Posted by – November 14, 2018

James Bottomley is a software engineer from IBM. Bottomley specializes in container and cloud technology as well as general open source technologies. He is a board member of the Linux Foundation and has experience and involvement in several open source projects. He is a maintainer for both the Linux kernel and SCSI project.

World’s Most Powerful ARM Desktop: Marvell ThunderXStation ThunderX2 Workstation

Posted by – November 5, 2018

Gigabyte announces the industry’s first ARMv8 workstation based on Cavium’s ThunderX2 ARM64 multi-core processor. This 4U workstation is called the ThunderXStation. GIGABYTE has designed and is manufacturing the ThunderXStation. The 4U tower is 27″ (D) x 17″ (H) x 7″ (W) and designed for floor mounting. The power supply included is a 800W PSU with a 1+1 redundant option. The motherboard is a standard GIGABYTE motherboard form factor.

The motherboard includes:
Dual or single ThunderX2 processor support. Optionally with LGA 4077 socket.
Integrated chipset.
8x DIMMs per CPU.
DDR4 2666/2400/2133 MHz DIMMs.
1x Management LAN 10/100/1000 Mbps.
Integrated VGA, 1920×1200.
ASPEED AST2500 BMC.
2x PCIe Gen 3.0 slots per CPU. (1x x16/x8/x4/x1 AND 1x x8).
1x Type-1 OCP PCIe Gen 3.0 x16 slot per CPU.
2x NVMe PCIe Gen 3.0 x4 ports with on board SAS slim line connectors per CPU.
2x SATAIII on board connectors.
2x U.2 or SATAIII 2.5″ drive bay, supports any combination of NVMe and SATAIII SSDs.
1x RS-232 port.
4x USB 3.0 ports.
2x 8-pin GPU power connectors.

Each CPU can support upto 8 DDR4 DIMMs. The front 2.5″ drive bay supports upto 2 drives. An optional 3.5″ storage bay holds 4 drives. Initially, 2.2GHz 32-core 4-threads per core. Other SKUs will be available depending on demand. Various nVidia video cards have been tested with the open source Nouveau driver. Initial shipments include the nVidia GeForce 710 with dual monitor support. The AMDGPU driver has been tested with various AMD GPUs. Additional AMD and nVidia GPUs are being tested. Initial shipments include a 1 GbE PCIe adapter. If standard PCIe slots are in short supply a QLogic dual port 1/10 GBaseT RJ45 OCP adapter and driver are available. Units ship with Ubuntu 17.10. CentOS 7.4 and OpenSUSE are also available. Pricing is competitive with high end single and dual socket workstations from leading name brand workstation vendors with comparable Gold/Platinum processors. For the most upto date pricing and sales information on ThunderXStation please contact: http://www.phoenicselectronics.com

EBBR: Embedded Base Boot Requirements at Linaro Connect

Posted by – November 5, 2018

Standard pre-boot environment and boot sequence for embedded platforms, featuring:
– Upstream support in U-Boot
– UEFI ABI
– Firmware-provided system description (DT)
– Boots generic OS images
By standardizing the boot interfacei, platform specific details don’t need to be encoded into the OS, and the ABI supports portable pre-boot applications for test and boot control, future work will be on the more standard UEFI featured (e.g. Secure Boot).

Android Treble on Texas Instruments Beagle-X15 at Linaro Connect


Android Treble implemented on TI Beagle-X15 development board which is ARM Cortex-A15, making the upgrade process easier. So there is no need to communicate with the vendor to upgrade a device.