Linaro 11.10 released

[David Zinman]

The Linaro Team is pleased to announce the release of Linaro 11.10, Linaro’s
fifth release delivered on a monthly cadence.

This release includes components delivered by all Linaro Teams: Working Groups,
Landing Teams and Platform Teams. Again, the effort brings a  lot of updates
and new features, integrated on top of Android and Ubuntu.

Among the improvements brought by this release and delivered by Linaro
engineers, some prominent items worth mentioning are:
 * This month Linaro Ubuntu LEB images are based on Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric)
 featuring the latest and greatest Unity 3D experience ported to OpenGL ES by
 the Linaro Graphics Working Group. Note that this is one month ahead of plan
 and a remarkable achievement of the Developer Platform Team with support
 from the whole Linaro engineering organization.
 * The Linaro Android LEB also saw continued enablement improvements across all
 boards with functional audio through jacks and HDMI on PandaBoard being one
 prominent example. All Android LEBs have been moved over to a 3.x based
 kernel and include a TJBench port for continuous libjpeg benchmarking in the
 lab.
 * Linaro Kernel CI started a pilot exploring a new feature that allows
 maintainers to submit git trees as one time jobs for building and lab
 testing. Also Developer Platform Team now uses the Kernel CI infrastructure
 to continuously package and test a first LEB kernel.
 * To improve tracking of a continuous stream of build and runtime results
 coming from the kernel CI infrastructure, a waterfall type reporting tool
 provided by LAVA has been developed and added to the dashboard
 (http://validation.linaro.org/lava-server/kernel-ci-views/index). Initial
 Snowball boards have landed in the lab and the LAVA test repository
 incorporated support for power management CPU hotplug tests and "Insanity",
 a multimedia test suite.
 * Finally, even more sophistication on the CI front was introduced for Android
 through integrating Gerrit into the Linaro Android Build Service. Reviewed
 changes now automatically get build tested and a bot posts the outcome to
 the gerrit ticket, making it easier to catch issues before they are
 integrated into the official Linaro Android trees.
 * The Graphics Working Group has integrated GLEW with OpenGL ES support on
 Ubuntu 11.10 images. It is packaged and available at the Linaro Overlay PPA.
 * Linaros Kernel efforts improved Device Tree support for member platforms and
 made a first step in improving managability of board defconfigs through
 merge_config.sh script that helps to maintain config overlays. This has the
 potential to reduce redundancy carried by the various board defconfigs in
 the upstream kernel.
 * After a few month of investment into libjpeg-turbo optimization by the
 Multimedia Working Group, the recently started libpng effort carried
 successes this month and an initial component release of libpng 1.5 with a
 first set of ARM optimization is included in this release. PNG is a key
 building block of web browsing technology and improvements will be a direct
 benefit for usability in todays ARM based products.
 * This month Linaro GCC comes with critical performance fixes and developers
 using Linaro GDB can enjoy an improved native debugging experience through
 gdbserver. The Toolchain Working Group started to transition their custom
 validation infrastructure to the LAVA lab this cycle. The complete
 transition is expected to take additional months, but once complete it will
 free up engineering resources in the Working Group to focus on code.

We encourage everybody to use the 11.10 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/1110/Release#Release_Information

For better support and tracking the hardware sanity of our supported boards, we
now publish a board support status with each monthly release. The results for
Linaro 11.10 are available here:

 Android: http://wiki.linaro.org/Cycles/1110/BoardSupport/Android
 Ubuntu: http://wiki.linaro.org/Cycles/1110/BoardSupport/Ubuntu

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/1110/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

-- 
David Zinman
Linaro Release Manager | Project Manager
Linaro.org | Open source software for ARM SoCs