It' s easy to get good players. Getting them to play together, that's the hard part. ~Casey Stengel

The Linaro 13.07 release is now available for download!

The 13.07 Linaro release highlights the collaborative efforts of all the Linaro Teams – Working Groups, Landing Teams and Platform Teams who have provided all the updates and new features that are integrated on top of Android, OpenEmbedded and Ubuntu baselines during this development cycle. With this release we are reminded of the great "players" who come together to plan and create the future of Linux on ARM. Seeing the synergic efforts of Linaro, its members and the greater Open Source Community is what drives our future--the future of Linux on ARM.

On the Builds and Baselines front, the Linaro Stable Kernel preview 2013.07 was updated: based on the 3.10.1 stable kernel tree; including ARM MP patch set, IKS VExpress TC2 and Power efficient workqueue support, Android v3.10 experimental patch set from AOSP. Linaro OpenEmbedded baseline added libjpeg-turbo as the preferred provider for jpeg, updated to the Linaro GCC 4.8-2013.07 release and switched builds to use Linaro versions of binutils and eglibc (2.17). Linaro Android baseline reports that the Arndale platform has been updated with display support on HDMI using software graphics stack, and is built with the Linaro GCC 4.8-2013.07 release as well.

The Linaro toolchain Working Group released Linaro GCC 4.8 and 4.7 2013.07 which added address Sanitizer support for ARM along with the new -mrestrict-it option support. The backports of support for further AArch64 aand ARMv8 AArch32 instructions were added. Linaro eglibc 2.17-2013.07 has optimized string functions for AArch64: memcmp, memset, memcpy, memmove, bzero, strcmp, strlen, strnlen, strncmp.

As of this release, the Linaro LAVA lab now hosts 75 devices including 4 new member systems and an actual “LMP stack” which is a tower of 5 LAVA Multi-purpose Probe boards (including SDMux support) is now being prototyped and tested. Multi-node test is currently in beta, but a live demo from LCE13 can be seen at: http://multinode.validation.linaro.org sandbox. Advanced LAVA configuration options were reviewed during this cycle and topics that were discussed included managing a multi-machine (LAVA Servers & worker nodes), deployment with salt-stack (LAVA Cambridge Lab), generic test integration, creating a test parser, overriding boot commands and the new interactive boot command support in LAVA.

We encourage everybody to use the 13.07 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:

== LAVA ==

* LAVA Core * VExpress A9 test images no longer use the master image's boot loader * Support added for interactive bootloader commands. * Support for OpenID / Crowd added for LAVA. * LAVA Master images updated on images.validation.linaro.org * LAVA Multi-node * Multi-Node support has an initial implementation which can support communication between nodes under test via the use of a GroupDispatcher. * LAVA Lab Capabilities * LMP prototypes built and integration efforts into LAVA have begun. Focus will be integrating and stress testing the SDMUX LMP and then adding support for the other boards.

== Builds and Baselines ==

* Linaro Stable Kernel (preview) 3.10.1 2013.07 released * Based on 3.10.1 stable tree * big.LITTLE support: * ARM MP patch set * IKS * VExpress TC2 support * Power efficient workqueue support * Android v3.10 experimental patch set from AOSP * Linux Linaro 3.10.1 2013.07 released * based on linux-linaro-core-tracking tree, llct-20130715.0 tag: * based on v3.10.1 * gator version 5.15 (same version as in 13.06 release) * updated linaro-android-3.10 topic by John Stultz * binder 64 bit patch * numa/huge pages topics (same version as in 13.06 release) * new MP patches from ARM (via integration-linaro-vexpress topic) * big-LITTLE-MP-master-v18 (same as the v17 from 13.06 release, but the "system wide power_efficient workqueues" commits reverted) * interactive-gov-updates topic from Viresh Kumar (rebased version of the 13.05 topic) * updated Versatile Express patches from ARM LT * arndale/exynos patches from Samsung LT (rebased version of the 13.06 topic) * a patch to enable perf in Android by Bernhard Rosenkraenzer (same as in 13.05) * vexpress64 support (both RTSM and Foundation model) * omap-fixes-13.06 topic: to make USB host and the on-board ethernet operational on Panda (same as in 13.06 release) * config fragments changes: * new xen.conf added * distribution.conf: add more configs for libvirt * arndale.conf: removed CONFIG_DEBUG_LL=y, CONFIG_EARLY_PRINTK=y, and CONFIG_DEBUG_S3C_UART2=y (the latter one depends on the formers) as they break xen * Linaro OpenEmbedded baseline updates: * Added PAM to DISTRO_FEATURES * Set libjpeg-turbo as the preferred provider for jpeg * Updated to Linaro GCC 4.8-2013.07 release * Switched builds to use Linaro versions of binutils and eglibc (2.17) * Linaro Android baseline updates: * Arndale build updated with display support on HDMI using software graphics stack * pm-qa, mmtest, cachecoherency, gatortest and imetest migrated to lava-test-shell * Android builds updated to build with Linaro GCC 4.8 2013.07 release * Linaro Toolchain Binaries 2013.07 released. It includes latest Linaro GCC 4.8-2013.07-1 and Linaro Eglibc 2.17-2013.07-2 releases.

== Kernel ==

* Convert Moxart to GENERIC_CLOCKEVENTS * Storage EXT4 journal in enhanced area of eMMC * Club journal and metadata together in enhanced area

== Power Management ==

* Linaro Powerdebug 2013.07 released * Support for multiple key code for ENTER key * Clocks: Allow child clock to be seen

== QA ==

* Successfully completed 13.07 release testing on Android (linux-linaro and LSK), Ubuntu and OpenEmbedded baselines. Test results and bug reports have been shared. * Manual UEFI testing was performed on Versatile Express A9 board. * Initial setup for KVM testing is in place

== Toolchain ==

* Linaro GCC 4.8 2013.07 released, based off the latest GCC 4.8.1+svn200355 release. * Address Sanitizer support for ARM. * New -mrestrict-it option support. * Backport of support for further AArch64 instructions. * Backport of support for further ARMv8 AArch32 instructions. * Reverted recent changes to shrink-wrapping and tail-calls * Linaro GCC 4.7 2013.07 released, based off the latest GCC 4.7.3+svn200408 release. * Linaro eglibc 2.17 2013.07 released * Optimized string functions for AArch64: memcmp, memset, memcpy, memmove, bzero, strcmp, strlen, strnlen, strncmp.

The release details are linked from the “Details” column for each released artifact on the release information:

http://wiki.linaro.org/Cycles/1307/Release#Release_Information

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 OpenEmbedded-based images =======================

With the Linaro provided downloads and with ARM’s Fast Models virtual platform, you can boot a virtual ARMv8 system and run 64-bit binaries.

For more information please see:

http://www.linaro.org/engineering/armv8

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/1307/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