The Linaro Team is pleased to announce the release of Linaro 11.11, another
of Linaro’s releases delivered on a monthly cadence.This release includes
components delivered by all Linaro Teams: Working Groups, Landing Teams and
Platform Teams. Some outstanding effort has gone into delivering a lot
of exciting updates and features integrated on top of Android and Ubuntu.
Up to now, this reads like a normal monthly release announcement, but wasn’t
there something special??? Yes!
We had Android Ice Cream Sandwich for the world this month and the Android
Team worked hard to deliver a sneak preview of early alpha ICS images for our 4
primary development targets!
The Release Team notes that this is a remarkable achievement and congratulates
the Linaro Android Team for this effort that showed how agile that
team is set up
to accommodate engineering plan mid-month and get these builds up and out
within 10 days. Check out our ICS running on Snowball. Video available on
youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQOKPLg3ARE.
If you don’t want to read the rest of this announcement but want to
get started on our ICS builds, please go to our download mirror directly,
download the bits and follow our easy install instructions that you
will find there:
http://releases.linaro.org/11.11/android/images-ics-preview
Obviously, Linaro continued to deliver great stuff outside of those Android ICS
builds. So here are the big items that the Release Team has selected to feature
this time:
The Android rockstars delivered ICS preview builds but did not detour from their
initially stated release goals. Among them we have an upgraded Android LEB
based off Android 2.3.7 that comes again with all optimizations and
bleeding edge Linaro toolchain integration. Other Android builds
showcase a first
release for Versatile Express using the Linaro ARM LT kernel, a NEON optimized
libpng, preliminary DS-5 support and a host of bug fixes and enhancement's to
existing support.
The Linaro Ubuntu LEB now supports officially the PandaBoard ES and features
PandaBoard's USB booting with U-Boot USB-SPL. The developer story was
improved with updated ARM DS-5 packages. Source and debug packages for all
Linaro's kernel flavors are now available. Additionally, Firefox can now be
cross-built using multi-arch. Instructions are available from
http://wiki.linaro.org/Platform/DevPlatform/CrossCompile/FirefoxCrossCompile.
The Infrastructure Team rolled out our new git mirroring approach to
our android cloud build service that uses a seed approach. With that, we noticed
considerable speedup in total build time for android builds as well as
a massive
improvement with regard to scalability as the load put on git-daemons that can
be quite inefficient is minimized due to this improvement. On top
Infrastructure
released an update to status.linaro.org that connects engineering with roadmap
planning using the well known status.linaro.org approach.
The Graphics team has added a new benchmark for bump-mapping for glmark2.
Bump-mapping is a technique for simulating bumps and wrinkles on the surface of
an object. This improvement is coming along side LAVA test cases that improve
glmark2 support for automated testing and in particular support
bump-mapping now.
Linux Linaro 3.1-2011.11 release includes a fresh rebase of Linaro
improvements to the v3.1.1 mainline kernel and features LPAE support,
Samsung Exynos cpuidle,sched_mc optimization, and a fix for mmap
greater than 2GB. The Kernel WG has also enabled eCryptFS in Linaro and
Android kernel defconfigs.
Some highlights for the Multimedia team are that Speex was released on Linaro
Ubuntu evaluation build with NEON optimisation patches, libpng v1.5
was released with additional patches to allow NEON auto-detection, and
libjpeg-turbo is now built with compatibility for libjpeg8.
The Validation Team started to land the new LAVA user interface and navigation,
with a shiny Linaro theme. Under the hood, LAVA infrastructure has been
upgraded, including network improvements and more memory to better serve its
increasing users base.
Full details of this release, including detailed release highlights
and known issues, can be found on the release pages of our Wiki.
We encourage everybody to use the 11.11 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/1111/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/1111/BoardSupport/Android
Ubuntu: http://wiki.linaro.org/Cycles/1111/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/GetSourcehttp://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/1111/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
Hi all,
Linaro Image Tools in its 2011.11 incarnation is available for download
from
https://launchpad.net/linaro-image-tools/11.11/2011.11
Notable changes include:
* Adds support for a new directory layout of releases.linaro.org
* Works-around a problem in python-apt on 64-bit Oneiric installations
(bug #885895).
* Improvements for Android on Snowball.
* Drops S5VP310 support in fetch-image (focusing on Origen).
* Adds VExpress support to linaro-android-media-create.
If you find any problems, please file them on
https://bugs.launchpad.net/linaro-image-tools/+filebug
Cheers,
Danilo
The Linaro Toolchain Working Group is pleased to announce the
release of Linaro QEMU 2011.11.
Linaro QEMU 2011.11 is the latest monthly release of
qemu-linaro. Based off upstream (trunk) QEMU, it includes a
number of ARM-focused bug fixes and enhancements.
New in this month's release:
- The ARM vexpress-a9, versatilepb, versatileab and realview-*
boards now have audio support (thanks to Mathieu Sonet who
contributed a PL041 implementation upstream)
- Support for multiple instances of the "-sd" option on the
command line has been dropped; this was never present in
upstream QEMU and has been removed for consistency. Use
"-drive,if=sd,index=N,file=file.img" for N=0,1,2... instead
- Fixes #886980: 8 and 16 bit reads from the OMAP GPIO module
would crash due to an infinite recursion
- Fixes #823902: problems running multithreaded programs in
linux-user mode
Known issues:
- Graphics do not work for OMAP3 based models (beagle, overo)
with 11.10 Linaro images.
NB: if you run QEMU on a host system without properly configured
audio you might find that QEMU now hangs at some point; you can
fix this by fixing your host system, or work around it by setting
the environment variable QEMU_AUDIO_DRV=none.
If you build from source you may now want to pass configure
a suitable --audio-drv-list=LIST option.
The source tarball is available at:
https://launchpad.net/qemu-linaro/+milestone/2011.11
Binary builds of this qemu-linaro release are being prepared and
will be available shortly for users of Ubuntu. Packages will be in
the linaro-maintainers tools ppa:
https://launchpad.net/~linaro-maintainers/+archive/tools/
More information on Linaro QEMU is available at:
https://launchpad.net/qemu-linaro
The Linaro Toolchain Working Group is pleased to announce the 2011.11
release of Linaro GCC 4.6.
No changes were made in Linaro GCC 4.5 or Linaro GDB this month and,
as such, no release has been made.
Linaro GCC 4.6 2011.11 is the ninth release in the 4.6 series. Based
off the latest GCC 4.6.2 release, it contains a range of vectoriser
performance improvements and general bug fixes.
Interesting changes include:
* Updates to 4.6.2
* A new -mtune=native flag to auto-detect the CPU of the build machine
* A new -mtune=generic-* flag to tune for a blend of processors
* Use of the ARMv7 unaligned access support for unaligned variables
* Vectorization of widening shifts
* Support for different load offsets and swap operands in SLP
* Support for multiple types in SLP
* Support for scheduling register moves in SMS
Fixes:
* LP: #836401 ICE on a | (b << negative-constant)
The source tarballs are available from:
https://launchpad.net/gcc-linaro/+milestone/4.6-2011.11
Downloads are available from the Linaro GCC page on Launchpad:
https://launchpad.net/gcc-linaro
More information on the features and issues are available from the
release page:
https://launchpad.net/gcc-linaro/4.6/4.6-2011.11
Mailing list: http://lists.linaro.org/mailman/listinfo/linaro-toolchain
Bugs: https://bugs.launchpad.net/gcc-linaro/
Questions? https://ask.linaro.org/
Interested in commercial support? inquire at support(a)linaro.org
-- Michael
