Grant Likely is a Linaro Fellow, Linux kernel Device Tree maintainer and Chair of the Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board. In this video he talks about the things Linaro has been doing to advance Linux on ARM and where he sees Linaro working towards in the future. They helped make big.LITTLE possible, they advance power/performance scheduling features around current and future ARM SoC designs to optimize the performance and power consumption for ARM Powered devices, from mobile to high-performance servers and networking.
Category: Linaro Connect
ARM64 Open Laptop Project by Vero Apparatus
Posted by – March 26, 2015
Vero Apparatus is trying to design the worlds most powerful ARM Powered Laptop, powerful enough for software developers at Linaro to use ARM Laptops for their ARM related software development. The open source hardware and software will address the concerns that many people have about proprietary products, and provide the most transparent assurances about absence of security vulnerabilities.
The ARM64 Open Laptop concept was announced in an ad hoc session at DebConf 2014 in Portland, Oregon, where over a dozen interested developers gathered at fairly short notice. They approved the concept and decided on some of the things to do next. See the slides of the presentation
The idea is to produce a small quantity (say 100) of replacement motherboards physically compatible with a laptop model that is already popular with developers. Lenovo or HP might have suitable chassis models. The Lenovo X220 is a good candidate but Vero Apparatus is open to alternative proposals. The design will re-use an existing case, SATA drive, display, battery, keyboard, touchpad, webcam, speaker and microphone to reduce development cost.
The main processor will probably be an AMD Opteron A1100 system-on-chip code named “Seattle”. In short, this has four or eight 64-bit Cortex-A57 cores, supports up to 128GB RAM, SATA and LAN. Being a server chip it lacks video, audio and USB, so either those must be added to the motherboard or another, more versatile chip must come along soon. Hardware choices will opt for longer battery life rather than 3D graphics performance.
Debian GNU/Linux is the default OS and distribution choice but Open Source implies freedom for the user. UEFI is the preferred firmware architecture, realistically in the form of Tianocore EDK2.
Qualcomm at Linaro Connect, Open Source Freedreno GPU Drivers for Qualcomm Adreno GPUs running on Inforce Computing’s Single-board-computers
Posted by – March 17, 2015
Hacking on Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 and Snapdragon 805 based Inforce Computing single-board-computers, Inforce 6410 and Inforce 6540, in this video, the Qualcomm Linaro Landing Team and Qualcomm Linaro engineers talk about the status of Ubuntu Linux release on Snapdragon 600 processor based development boards. Rob Clark, Freedreno project owner, talks about the status of open source graphics drivers for Qualcomm Adreno processor. The Linaro Linux release uses Freedreno graphics driver for HW acceleration. Other landing team engineers talk about various other plugins and drivers such Gstreamer plugin developed for the Linux release to enable to support for HW accelerated HTML5 video. There has been a lot of progress made on up streaming drivers for Snapdragon processors. For latest Linaro Linux release, visit: http://releases.linaro.org/latest/ubuntu/snapdragon For information on development boards based on Snapdragon processor, visit http://mydragonboard.org/. For Inforce Computing’s single-board-computers based on Snapdragon processors, visit http://inforcecomputing.com/products/inforce_products.html
kernelci.org upstream kernel validation project
Posted by – February 28, 2015
Category: Development Boards, Software, Exclusive videos, Linaro Connect, Android, Chrome OS, Ubuntu
Tyler Baker discusses and demos http://kernelci.org, where development boards all over the world are being booted with the bleeding edge upstream kernel to provide validation results to the kernel community.
48-core 64bit Cavium ThunderX ARM Server demonstrating Virtualization
Posted by – February 24, 2015
Cavium is showing the most powerful ARM Processor in the world, with a 48-core ARMv8 64bit processor, demonstrating the high-performance visualization running the Xen Hypervisor running on an internal evaluation board and the KVM Hypervisor running on a rack-mounted 1U platform.
Google Project Ara development boards at Linaro Connect, Greybus status with Greg Kroah-Hartman
Posted by – February 22, 2015
Category: Smartphones, Development Boards, Sensors, Exclusive videos, Rockchip, Marvell, Linaro Connect, Google, Android
Greg Kroah-Hartman shows the Google Project Ara prototype phone and development board, and he talks about Greybus the protocol that they are developing to make it possible for these hardware modules that must be able to talk to each other and to the host module, they can be hot swappable, they have to be able to describe themselves so everything just works smoothly, they work on the knowledge that they have from USB, PCI, Firewire and all the previous protocols that people have implemented, they work on the base level of what UniPro can do, and they go from there. This is just another sub-system of Linux that drivers plug into. Rob Herring is the project tech lead at Linaro for Project Ara, and he talks about how the Linaro guys are working on the Kernel portions, the ARM Applications Processor modules and the Android modifications to support hardware modules hotplug in a Smartphone.
Google Project Ara at Linaro Connect 2015
Posted by – February 21, 2015
Smartphone hardware modules Google Project Ara is being shown by Linaro CEO George Grey, as the modifications to Linux on ARM to support Project Ara are being developed and optimized together with Linaro engineers, many of the Google Project Ara engineers meet at the Linaro Connect conference to advance their development for the project. Linaro is one of many companies working for Google on Project Ara, focused on the firmware and on the software to make Android work with removable modules, to communicate through the UniPro bus for hardware modules. Linaro has a lot of experts in Linux and the Linux kernel, able to deliver what Google needs for this project.
ZTE ZX296702 Dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 for Set-top-boxes at Linaro Connect
Posted by – February 20, 2015
The Linaro ZTE Landing Team engineers talk about optimizing Android Kitkat boot time using TuxOnIce hibernation mechanism on ZTE SmartTV board. The net result is that it takes around 10 seconds to get into the Android home screen from a fresh power-on compared to the original over 30 seconds bootup time among other optimizations that they are doing for the ZTE Powered Set-top-box which is in millions of homes in China and around the world.
LAVA Lab to integrate HiKey from 96Boards.org
Posted by – February 18, 2015
The LAVA Lab is to integrate the Hisilicon Kirin 620 based 64bit HiKey board from http://96boards.org. Tyler Baker and Dave Pigott from the Linaro validation team discuss their plans for the deployment and testing of the HiKey board.
64bit HiKey Board selling at $129 through Arrow Electronics
Posted by – February 17, 2015
Arrow Electronics is the world’s biggest distributor of electronics components, they are a supporting partner in the Hi-Key development board, supported by the new http://96Boards.org program. With experience in distributing many different previous developments like the TI based Beaglebone, Arrow is excited for the things to come in this space. This is the world’s first affordable 64bit ARM development board for software developers, makers, and OEMs. It comes with 4GB of eMMC, WiFi/BLE, and HDMI output. You can order yours today for $129 at https://parts.arrow.com/item/detail/circuitco/999-0005854#GenG
Hisilicon D02, 16-core ARM Cortex-A57 High Performance Board (32-core version coming next months!)
Posted by – February 15, 2015
Hisilicon engineer Justin Zhao, Software Architect at Hisilicon SoC architecture department, is bringing up the Linux software on the Hisilicon D02 Board, one of the most powerful ARM Processors in the world. They have a configuration with 32-core Cortex A57 @ max 2.1GHz and up to 2 SoC per board coming up within a few months (64-cores per board!), each SoC has 1MB L2 cache/cluser, 32MB L3 cache. The board has 12 SATA\SAS (8 for one SoC, 4 for the other), 2 10/100/1000Mb/s compatible Ethernet ports, 2 10Gb/s SFP+ Ethernet ports, 8 DDR3 RAM DIMMs, 4 PCIE solts (2 pieces/SoC), 2 UARTs & 2 JTAGs for debug, 1 USB host. Rob Savoye of Linaro’s Toolchain Group joins in this video discussing the installation of the latest GCC to this Board. Justin Zhao shows how he can bootup from Sata, PXE, Provision mode, NFS, with OpenSuse 13.1, Ubuntu 14.04, working on Red Hat. A LAMP (LAVA) and lxc (container) have already been enabled, and some Benchmarks (e.g. perf, iperf, ltp) have been executed on it too, perhaps Hisilicon will soon publish the test results also.
Linaro Engineers, world’s top Linux on ARM engineers, Hiring process and collaboration
Posted by – February 15, 2015
Category: Exclusive videos, Linaro Connect
Linaro has been going through a 4 and a half year growth hiring the world’s top Linux on ARM engineers globally, and working on their collaboration initiatives to keep everyone communicating and happy. This is a conversation between Release Manager, Koen Kool and Director Global Talent, Mike Levine.
96Boards Linaro Development Boards Initiative, $129 HiKey with Hisilicon 64bit Kirin620
Posted by – February 12, 2015
Category: Development Boards, Exclusive videos, HiSilicon, Linaro Connect, Android, Chrome OS, Ubuntu
With the first being the Hislicon Kirin620 Octa Core ARM Cortex-A53 based $129 HiKey development board, http://96Boards.org is a new open hardware specification for ARM 32bit and 64bit development boards, and a Community Program for software delivery to developers, makers and OEMs. In this video, Linaro CEO George Grey describes the standardized expansion buses for peripheral I/O, display and cameras allowing the hardware ecosystem to develop a range of compatible add-on products that will work on any 96Boards product over the lifetime of the platform.The 96Boards initiative is designed to offer a single software and hardware community across multiple vendor boards supporting a range of different features. A fixed set of minimum functions including USB, SD, HDMI and standardized low speed and high speed peripheral connectors are provided. Vendors may add customized hardware and feature sets provided the minimum functions are available. Linaro expects this to extend the platform life, increase the market for add-on hardware, and accelerate open source upstreaming of support for new SoC features.
Here is the session by Linaro CEO George Grey talking further about the 96Boards hardware at Linaro Connect Hong Kong 2015:
Hisilicon 3716CV200 runs RDK with Chromium Blink Framework
Posted by – February 8, 2015
Linaro with members such as Hisilicon are porting and optimizing Chromium Blink with gstreamer running just above EGL, the next steps are to merging fully with the RDK project to replace the webkit core with blink core.
Live Lava Lab demonstration, adding new development boards for automatic testing
Posted by – February 8, 2015
Category: Development Boards, Exclusive videos, Allwinner, Texas Instruments, Qualcomm, Samsung, Linaro Connect, Android, Ubuntu
Showing how easy it is to integrate any development board in Lava. Beaglebone Black, Allwinner A20 Cubieboard2, IFC6410, Odroid-UX3 (Exynos5422). They can take any new board and just get it connected. LAVA is an automated validation architecture primarily aimed at testing deployments of systems based around the Linux kernel on ARM devices, specifically ARMv7 and later. The current range of boards (device types) supported by this LAVA instance can be seen on the scheduler status page https://validation.linaro.org/scheduler/ which includes details of how many boards of each type are available for tests and currently running jobs.
eInfochips enabling Linux support on ARM based SoCs
Posted by – February 8, 2015
They have enabled the Qualcomm Snapdragon APQ8064 (Snapdragon 600) with Linaro’s Linaro OpenEmbedded based Ubuntu release. They have optimized it for video/audio capture encode/decode through software based encoding and optimizing HD resolution with hardware acceleration for video-chat.
Gocupi drawbot polargraph robot suspends a pen/marker draws on vertical surface
Posted by – February 8, 2015
David Mandala shows the Gocupi that at Linaro Connect. The cool thing (beyond that is was made by a couple of guys from the DallasMakerSpace) is that it is a real project that uses an ARM embedded computer and it could do more if it had a more powerful ARM embedded computer.
It is also a contraption more commonly referred to as a ‘drawbot’ or ‘polargraph’. The gocupi is a robot that suspends a pen or marker between two stepper motors and draws on a vertical surface. Each stepper motor has a spool attached to it’s shaft which is wound with a thin braided line, and these spools move simultaneously to control the position of the pen that hangs between them.
The positioning is all accomplished by using a polar coordinate for each point on a path for each stepper motor. To determine how the pen should move from one point to the next the gocupi calculates the velocity and acceleration based on a number of factors, the most notably being the position on the drawing surface. The gocupi knows lines near the edge of the page drawn at high speed have a tendency to produce an unintended line or may cause the pen to bounce off of the surface creating dots and dashes instead of a line. This is all taken into consideration for each transition of the pen from on point on a path to the next. To further put that process into perspective, it is not uncommon for a drawing to consists of 800,000 points (or more) and take 45 minutes to an hour for the gocupi to draw.
Find out more about it at: http://gocupi.com/
https://github.com/brandonagr/gocupi
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1412673920/gocupi-turns-your-raspberry-pi-into-a-portable-pol
http://dallasmakerspace.org/
Chromium Blink Embedded Framework on STM B2102 and Hisilicon Poplar
Posted by – February 8, 2015
The Linaro team ported the Chromium Embedded Framework to Linux running on ARM, the framework utilizes an EGL backend integrated using Chromium’s Ozone abstraction layer.
Linaro Performance Contest, John Maddog Hall
Posted by – February 8, 2015
At http://performance.linaro.org/, in anticipation of ARM’s new 64-bit architecture, Linaro reviewed some of the source code of a typical GNU/Linux system and found over 1400 source code modules that included ARM assembly language which might need to be ported and does need to be tested to work on new ARM 64-bit processors (Aarch64).
Linaro also recognized that some of the modules were written a long time ago (by computer standards) when CPUs were single core and not multi-core, compilers were not as optimized and RAM memories were smaller and more expensive leading to trade-offs in portability and algorithm selection. In today’s era, it might be better to re-evaluate the use of assembly language and perhaps replace it completely with a higher-level language such as “C”. It might also be worthwhile to review algorithms that made sense in an earlier time, but have outlived their usefulness.
In some cases the assembly language that exists in the code was “transposed” from existing assembly language of a different architecture and did not necessarily utilize the best features of each assembly or machine language architecture. In other cases it might make more sense to create a compiler intrinsic to do certain functions such as identifying the architecture of the machine.
Finally, while the code in the modules may be very efficient and highly portable, the compiler invocations may need review to take advantage of new optimization switches.
All this amounts to a major opportunity to not only ensure GNU/Linux based systems will operate efficiently on new ARM 64-bit processors, but also to optimize the performance of these systems across architectures. In pursuit of this performance goal, Linaro decided to create a long-running performance contest directed at these modules, and in the future extend the contest to even more modules which may or may not have assembler language in them.
To get started, click on the “Getting Started” Tux Penguin: http://performance.linaro.org/start/
Rob Savoye, developer of Gnash, Tech Lead at the Linaro Toolchain Working Group
Posted by – December 11, 2014
Category: Exclusive videos, Linaro Connect
Rob Savoye has been working on GCC since 1987, on the team that originally made it, started programming computers in 1977 using Fortran 4. Rob Savoye is a Tech Lead in Support Maintenance at http://linaro.org Also see my previous video with Rob Savoye here.
