David Rusling says this has been the best Linaro Connect for him thus far in the 7 years since Linaro was started. He talks about how Google recognizes the part Linaro can play to help with Project Trebble, to help keep longer term support for each LTS kernel release also as part of the Linaro Mobile Group. The Linaro Enterprise Day showed how far Linaro has gotten to with all the work coming together towards ARM Servers taking market share in the server market. Kanta Vekaria works towards Linaro’s involvment with High Performance Computing (HPC) as she talked about in her keynote Nicolas Pitre is working on making the Internet of Tiny Linux (IoTL) to make Linux suitable for IoT you can see his talk here persuading the kernel developers that making changes that benefit the embedded market. Linaro is very active with Zephyr which is kind of the Linux Kernel of the embedded world, working on it in in the Linaro IoT & Embedded Group (LITE). Talking about the establishment of the Open Source Foundries spin-off of Linaro where they can pursue business opportunities to work more closely together with customers who need help implementing open source on ARM solutions such as the IoT solutions shown in this video also introducing the Associate Membership Level for smaller members such as small to medium companies and Universities to be able to join Linaro in the coming months trying to involve everyone in the open source ecosystem. Linaro also is looking into getting involved with open source for the Automotive market possibly related to the software needed for self-driving cars and more. Linaro getting involved with open source for artificial intelligence, machine learning. You can see my previous videos with David Rusling over the past 5 years here.
Category: Favorite companies
David Rusling, Linaro CTO talks Trebble, Servers, HPC, Tiny Linux IoTL, Automotive, Machine Learning
Jon Masters, Red Hat Chief ARM Architect at Linaro Connect San Francisco 2017
Jon Masters says Moores Law may have come to an end and that single threaded performance is not defining the industry anymore because it’s not increasing at the same rate that it used to. What is defining the future of the industry is machine learning, accelerators, lots of additional workload optimization that is happening outside of the core. Thus he believes ARM has an opportunity to get into the mainstream server space in the next 12-18 months with the newest powerful ARM Server solutions such as the Cavium ThunderX2 and the Qualcomm Centriq 2400. You can see some of my previous Jon Masters interviews over the past 5 years here.
Paul McKenney of IBM talks RCU, Quantum Computing at Linaro Connect San Francisco 2017
I previously interviewed Paul McKenney at Linaro Connect 5 years ago in Hong Kong here, since then he has been working with a lot of things at IBM and this is the first time he’s back at Linaro Connect since that initial interview. He says there might be 20 Billion Linux machines in the world, most of them running on ARM, all of them have Paul McKenney’s Read-Copy Update (RCU) code in them.
Read-copy update (RCU) is a synchronization mechanism that was added to the Linux kernel in October of 2002. RCU achieves scalability improvements by allowing reads to occur concurrently with updates. In contrast with conventional locking primitives that ensure mutual exclusion among concurrent threads regardless of whether they be readers or updaters, or with reader-writer locks that allow concurrent reads but not in the presence of updates, RCU supports concurrency between a single updater and multiple readers. RCU ensures that reads are coherent by maintaining multiple versions of objects and ensuring that they are not freed up until all pre-existing read-side critical sections complete. RCU defines and uses efficient and scalable mechanisms for publishing and reading new versions of an object, and also for deferring the collection of old versions. These mechanisms distribute the work among read and update paths in such a way as to make read paths extremely fast. In some cases (non-preemptable kernels), RCU’s read-side primitives have zero overhead.
Open Source Foundries IoT Zephyr, Linux, IoT Gateways, Bluetooth Mesh microPlatforms demo
Open Source Foundries is a spin off company off of Linaro, composed of a talented group of engineers to work more directly with companies, OEMs, ODMs, small, medium to large companies to bring new open source products and solutions more rapidly to the market. Leveraging all the work done by Linaro and speeding up the time to market, enable rapid product development, here demonstrating some of the open source IoT solutions provided based on Zephyr on ARM Cortex-M and Linux on ARM Cortex-A using the Linaro Technologies Division (LTD) microPlatforms system.
The lack of a secure IoT solution has the industry scrambling. The Open Source Foundries team believes that a world can exist in which all connected devices can be secured and updated in a timely fashion. In this demonstration shown at the Linaro Connect San Francisco 2017, the team showcases its secure end to end FOTA (firmware over the air) solution implementing the latest in connected technologies.
At Open Source Foundries, software is their passion, hacking hardware is their favorite past time, so they have created the OSLight project to convert off the shelf hardware into secure connected devices. They have inserted a Red Bear NRF52 BLE Nano 2 into these lamps, to allow them to communicate over BLE with various cloud services. In the first demo, they demonstrate creating a secure BLE mesh network with these lamps. They show the ability to securely pass messages through the mesh network to control the state of the LED lamp. The next demo shows a set of 96Boards Nitrogens sending temperature data to the SoftBank IoT Cloud with the ONEM2M protocol using 6lowpan over BLE. The third and final demo introduces a variant of the OSLight project, a fully 3D printed light bulb. Instead of a simple LED array it has a 12 LED WRGB NeoPixel which is powered by line voltage, stepped down to 5VDC.
For microcontrollers, they offer their Zephyr microplatform, an open source software reference based on Zephyr RTOS and MCUboot. This software stack implements secure boot, unified microkernel, and IP (TCP or UDP) using 6lowpan over BLE. At the protocol level they’ve embraced industry standards such as LWM2M/ONEM2M/HTTPS/MQTT to provide an array of options for their customers, whilst ensuring no vendor lock in. Open Source Foundries subscribers are offered continuous validated software updates throughout the life of their product for a fixed monthly subscription fee.
On the gateway, they offer their Linux microplatform, which is again, an open source reference based on the latest Linux kernel version, and a minimal Yocto based userspace with a container runtime (Docker). By isolated the OS from the containers, each can be updated independently while providing limitless potential for the applications it can run. For updates they again implement standards, and stay vendor neutral to allow their customers to choose the solution that is right for them. Continuous validated updates for the OS and containers are also offered for this platform for a reasonable fixed monthly fee.
Gordon Kruberg, Gumstix CEO, inventor of the HDMI Stick at Linaro Connect San Francisco 2017
Gordon Kruberg, President, CEO and Founder of Gumstix Inc. In 2004, they launched the world’s first HDMI Stick Computer and they also invented the first SOM running Linux and computers were officially introduced with Gumstix first motherboard alongside the Waysmall computer, about the size of a stick of gum. Apple bought many of these to do their initial testing of iOS on ARM to try to have a smooth UI to work on ARM early. Gumstix now has an online tool called Geppetto that allows users to design their own PCB boards which can be used in combination with boards from TechNexion and Toradex, in 2013 it started a crowd-funding service to allow a group of users that want to get a custom design manufactured to share the costs to start manufacturing any new PCB idea. A new PCB idea can be made through Gumstix Gepetto for a $2000 setup manufacturing fee then payments for each board. They estimate that any project needing to design and manufacture custom PCB boards in quantities lower than 20 thousand pieces, that they are providing the most cost effective and fastest time to market.
Sahaj Sarup of Geek Till It Hertz, Manivannan Sadhasivam and Michael Welling at Linaro Connect 2017
Sahaj Sarup of the Geek Till It Hertz youtube channel, which he created 4 years ago with a goal to share his Raspberry Pi projects and experiments with the world. Soon it grew and he started featuring other development boards and technologies. His goal is to share projects that he does or the projects that gets him excited. Recently he has also featured a few unique operating systems such as Google’s Fuchsia OS and Redox OS (written entirely in rust language). He’s also maintaining a blog at http://geektillithertz.com/wordpress This video also features 96Boards Application Engineer Manivannan Sadhasivam who I also filmed featuring some of his projects at here and PCB designer Michael Welling who I interviewed here.
Kurt Keville of The MIT Supply Response Supercomputing Lab at Linaro Connect San Francisco 2017
The MIT Supply Response Supercomputing Lab has been investigating opportunities to get cycles when they are cheapest, either through an innovative sensor system that utilizes a hyperlocal weather monitoring application that watches clouds, or a clever scraping of PUC utility websites to ramp compute resources up when electricity is inexpensive. They are currently testing a number of projects that are based around ARM and utilizes every bit of the energy-aware programmability of big.LITTLE and Slurm Workload Manager.
#DIV/0! Is their Solar-Powered Supercomputing cluster. It is named for the error they got in Excel when they tried to calculate their performance per dollar.
They maintain the Debian ports of every HPC code they can get their hands on (please send some along if you have additions).
http://soc.mit.edu/opennovation.htm
IoTNet is the network in Boston and Cambridge which only handles IoT comms. It is low bandwidth, high latency and lossy which they are hoping will keep humans, with their real-time protocols, off. Machines and CPS like it because it is asynchronous, asymmetric and low power. If you have a key dongle for your car you are probably already using the TTN in your city.
Interested parties can contact them at MITARM@mit.edu
MIT SPS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6rrsQPkFKQ
ARMfest http://www.iotfestival.com/
Micro-Datacenter Design Challenge (past) http://www.inveneo.org/designchallenge/
Bero shows his ARM Desktop and ARM Laptop
Bero (Bernhard Rosenkränzer) from the Linaro Mobile Group set out this week as you can see in my previous video to build and bring up his ARM Desktop based on the Quad-core ARM Cortex-A72 Marvell MACCHIATObin development board with a Radeon or Nvidia GPU. Bero also built his own ARM Laptop based on the Dragonboard 820 running Open Mandriva Linux.
Latest from the Linaro Digital Home Group at Linaro Connect San Francisco 2017
Mark Gregotski, DIrector of the Linaro Digital Home Group, provides an update on the latest work in open source for the Digital Home Group that LHG is working on including the adoption of OP-TEE (Open Portable Trusted Execution Environment) with DRM integrations including PlayReady DRM PK v3.3 on AOSP 8.0 on the HiKey960 development board and Widevine for Linux and for Android AOSP. NXP demonstrates some of their work, NXP has recently joined the Linaro Digital Home Group. The LHG group has worked to integrate V4L2 with gstreamer and ffmpeg to improve media playback on ARM offloading all the computation onto the video codec hardware of the SoC.
Self Balancing Bot and Home Surveillance Kit by Manivannan Sadhasivam, Applications Engineer, Linaro
Manivannan Sadhasivam is an Applications Engineer at Linaro on the 96Boards team here Demonstrating some of his latest projects created out of 96Boards Consumer Edition such as the Self Balancing Bot capable of balancing itself using the MPU6050 IMU controlled by Dragonboard 410c. You can find that project at github and a Home Surveillance Kit powered by Dragonboard 410c. OpenCV is used to identify the faces, combined with AWS and servo control to create a home surveillance solution. You can find that project at github
$25 Hoperun Uranus 96Boards IoT board with TI CC3220 ARM Cortex-M4
This development board runs the TI CC3220 is for IoT applications featuring an ARM Cortex-M4 with an associated network processor that runs the whole Wi-Fi, TCP/IP and TLS stack so the main chipset doesn’t have to do any of the networking or security freeing up the whole ARM Cortex-M4 for the IoT application use. At Linaro Connect San Francisco 2017 they are showing it running TI RTOS and Zephyr. This board also features the LiPo battery connector. Adding also IPv6 support and TLS suite, an ARM Cortex-M4 with 1MB Flash, 256KB RAM running at 80Mhz. It’s very low power it can run for years off 2 AAA battery cells with the right duty cycle.
v4l2 in ffmpeg for Kodi with Mesa freedreno GPU hardware acceleration on Dragonboard 410c
Open Source video decoding with V4L2 (Video4Linux2) hardware accelerated video playback in ffmpeg with latest Kodi 18 from master branch. Video4Linux2 support for FFMPEG means fully open source video acceleration can be available for open source distributions on ARM, here shown off decoding video with v4l2m2m (Video4Linux 2 with Memory to Memory) on the Qualcomm DragonBoard 410c, for H264 decode. Other boards with other chipsets that have video decode engines that can support other codecs such as H265, VP9 etc at 4K and etc will then also be able to support that. It means you can upgrade the kernel when you want to what you want, giving you more freedom being less locked to vendor support and if you find a bug you can actually fix it. Filmed at Linaro Connect San Francisco 2017.
Qualcomm Dragonboard 820c with 4K Debian UI
This is the Qualcomm Dragonboard 820c running at 4K the Debian user interface, configured in the 96Boards Extended edition with full sized Ethernet port and more.
Qualcomm Dragonboard 600c
The Qualcomm DragonBoard 600c features the APQ8064 quad-core Qualcomm Krait chipset, with Adreno A320 GPU, it’s in the 96Boards Extended edition form factor with space for Gigabit Ethernet.
96Boards: $99 ROCK960 Rockchip RK3399 development board
Yang Zhang, Director of http://96boards.org presents the ROCK960 featuring Rockchip RK3399 Dual-core ARM Cortex-A72, Quad-core ARM Cortex-A53, Mali-T860MP4, USB 3.0, HDMI 2.0, USB Type-C with DisplayPort 1.2, 4-lane PCIe 2.1 for high speed communication to FPGA or external GPU is possible. Rock960 will be used by open AI efforts, with ARM Computing Library available for openCL acceleration. ROCK960 supports Android 7.1, Debian Stretch and Yocto officially, other distributions can be supported by the open source community. Rockchip provides multimedia Linux support for ROCK960. The likely price for the board is going to be $99 for 2GB RAM with 16GB emmc and $139 for 4GB RAM with 32GB emmc.
Specs:
* SoC – Rochchip RK3399 hexa-core big.LITTLE processor with two ARM Cortex A72 cores up to 1.8/2.0 GHz, four Cortex A53 cores @1.4GHz and ARM Mali-T860 MP4 GPU with OpenGL ES 1.1 to 3.2 support,
OpenVG1.1, OpenCL 1.2 and DX 11 support
* System Memory – 2 or 4GB RAM
* Storage – 16 or 32GB eMMC flash + micro SD card
* Video Output – 1x HDMI 2.0 up to 4K@60 Hz with CEC and HDCP
* Connectivity – WiFi 802.11ac 2×2 MIMO up to 867 Mbps, and Bluetooth
4.1 LE (AP6356S module) with two on-board antennas, two u.FL antenna
connectors
* USB – 1x USB 2.0 host port, 1x USB 3.0 port, 1x USB 3.0 type C port
with DP 1.2 support
Expansion
* 1x 40 pin low speed expansion connector – UART, SPI, I2C, GPIO, I2S
* 1x 60 pin high speed expansion connector – MIPI DSI, USB, MIPI CSI, HSIC, SDIO
* 1x M.2 key M PCIe connector with support for up to 4-lane PCIe 2.1
(max bandwidth: 2.0 GB)
* Misc – Power & u-boot buttons. 6 LEDS (4x user, 1x Wifi, 1x Bluetooth)
* Power Supply – 8 to 18V DC input (12V typical) as per 96Boards CE
specs; Battery header
Dimensions – 85 x 54 mm (96Boards CE form factor)
The team behind the ROCK960 is Vamrs Limited, a startup based on Shenzhen, China, with eight employees with average more than 10 years electronics and embedded experience. Vamrs is a 96boards contract Manufacturing Partner. (https://www.linaro.org/company/vamrs/)
Distributors and interested parties can contact Vamrs at support@vamrs.com
Qualcomm ARM Server Centriq 2400 at Linaro Connect San Francisco 2017
This is the Qualcomm 48-core (custom Qualcomm Falkor cores) Centriq 2400 ARM Server reference evaluation board. Featuring 48-cores with 12 DIMM slots of DDR4 RAM memory, dual PCI riser boards for fully customizable setup. At Linaro Connect SFO17, the ARM team is demonstrating an ELK big data demo with ElasticSEarch, Logstash and Kibana for graphic visualization running on Qualcomm Centriq 2400 processor. The Qualcomm Centriq 2400 processor is designed for cloud computing running these microservices in containers seamlessly. There is a 2nd demo of Linuxkit with NGINX running in a container. Both demos use Docker containers running on Ubuntu 16.04.
sub-$1000 Socionext 24-core ARM Desktop Developer Box
Daniel Thompson of Linaro talks about the upcoming new ARM Developerbox that was announced at Linaro Connect SFO17. The box is a 24-core ARM Cortex-A53 low-power workstation allowing software development for ARM to be done on ARM. The board is a collaboration between Socionext, Gigabyte and Linaro and is the first 96Boards Enterprise Edition platform to exploit microATX form-factor and feels like a normal PC motherboard, right up to the row of three PCIe slots that are available.
Socionext CEO Yasuo Nishiguchi at Linaro Connect San Francisco 201
Following his keynote to introduce Socionext and the recently announced multi-core desktop Arm developer platform Socionext Chairman and CEO Yasuo Nishiguchi PhD talks about servers, SoCs and the company’s new CPU-to-CPU communication technology DDT (Direct Data Transaction), and looks forward to the launch of the new desktop developer platform in the December-January time frame.
Purism Librem Debian phone, fully open source, Librem 11, 13, 15 Laptops
Purism Phone is crowdfunding at https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/ ($847’454 raised thus far) runs PureOS based on Debian Free/Libre and Open Source software and a GNU+Linux Operating System, it can run most GNU+Linux distributions, it’s runs many other upstream projects, it’s world’s first ever IP-native mobile handset with end-to-end decentralized communications via Matrix, with a 5″ display, Security focused by design, Privacy protection by default, works with 2G/3G/4G, GSM, UMTS, and LTE networks with an i.MX8 or i.MX6 CPU separate from Baseband with open-source GPU drivers, Hardware Kill Switches for Camera, Microphone, WiFi/Bluetooth, and Baseband. Purism also has a track record of delivering fully open source Intel powered laptops the Librem 11 2-in-1, the Librem 13 and the Librem 15.
Secure96 Security ICs and TPM Mezzanine for 96Boards
Joakim Bech presents the Secure96 mezzannine security board, daughter board for engineers to work with symmetric, asymmetric IC’s as well as a TPM chip. You can see Joakim Bech’s presentation and slides on this product here.
