“Success is almost totally dependent upon drive and persistence. The extra energy required to make another effort or try another approach is the secret of winning.” ~ Denis Waitley

We are pleased to announce the release of Linaro 12.06.

Linaro 12.06 contains components delivered by all Linaro Teams --Working Groups, Landing Teams and Platform Teams-- and brings an abundance of exciting updates and new features which are integrated on top of Android and Ubuntu. Linaro through these updates, fixes, and new features continue to build the future of Linux on ARM and the 12.06 Linaro release delivers another winning combination off these components.

In the 12.06 release, the Linaro Android Team delivers multimedia enablement on AOSP and those patches are now under review. The team now has automated benchmarking applications (Monkeyrunner) working on both the PandaBoard and Snowball boards.In addtion to the benchmarking now working on PandaBoard; perf for Andoid on PandaBoard has been submitted to the Linaro kernel maintainers for other ARM based processor boards and lkml. For this release Linaro Android was also updated to Android version 4.0.4 r2. Also of note; the video that Nicolas Charbonnier shot during the Demo Friday event at Linaro Connect Q2.12 in Hong Kong about the improvements to the Linaro Android toolchain continues to create interest in this teams work and the future of the possibilities of Android performance. More information on other exciting news surrounding Linaro Android can be found in the release highlights.

The Linaro Developer Platform Team announced that the Kernel config fragments are now being used by all kernel packages in the Linaro Evaluation Builds (LEBs) and this includes one single fragment for the Ubuntu Specific configs which allows for all builds to behave in a similar fashion. Other updates include all Linaro Linux kernel packages were updated to the latest development trees from Linux Linaro and the Linaro Landing Teams. The Linux Linaro maintenance scripts are now available and can be found on git.linaro.org; additionally improvements have been made to the instructions and scripts to allow easier cross-builing of packages using multi-arch with Ubuntu.

We encourage everybody to use the 12.06 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:

* Android * Multimedia enablement on AOSP, patches are in review. * Most of the benchmarking applications have been automated via Monkeyrunner, working on PandaBoard and Snowball. * Update panda-ics-gcc47-tilt-tracking-blob build to the TI LT 3.4 kernel. * USB camera preview and still capture forward ported to tilt-tracking. * 3D graphics and multimedia working on tilt-stable. * IOMMU for Origen's MFC enabled. * IOMMU for Origen's FIMC enabled. * Snowball upgraded to Android 4.0.4. * Cortex strings landed in Linaro Android and submitted to AOSP (https://android-review.googlesource.com/#/c/38031/) * Linaro Android updated to Android 4.0.4 r2.1. * Linaro Android panda-ics-gcc47-tilt-stable-blob build graphics acceleration upgraded with 4.0.4 binaries from AOSP. * perf for Android in PandaBoard, patches submitted to Linaro kernel maintainers for other boards and lkml (http://patches.linaro.org/9603/) * Worked around PandaBoard graphics issue (Panda crashes after 10 min, https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/912651) by using a lower resolution.

* Developer Platform * Kernel config fragments are now used by all the kernel packages available in the Linaro Evalution Builds, including one single fragment for the Ubuntu specific configs, which now allows all builds to behave similarly. * Pre-built images validation was improved for the supported Linaro Evaluation Builds flavours, including a html file that describe the image content, and displays the test results from LAVA. * Fixes for wifi-enablement, bluetooth-enablement, leb-basic-graphics and perf test cases. They should now be properly reflecting the Linaro Evaluation Builds images results. * Kernel packages updated to the latest development trees from Linux Linaro and Landing Teams. * A new Linux Linaro branch, called Linux Linaro Tracking, is now published. It contains the 3.4 Landing Team trees from TI, Samsung and ARM, delivering a single and unified tree which helps identifying conflicts and issues ahead of upstream. * Linux Linaro maintenance scripts are now available on http://git.linaro.org/gitweb?p=people/ynk/ll-tools.git%3Ba=summary repository. * Improved instructions and scripts to easily cross-build a package using multi-arch with Ubuntu, available on https://wiki.linaro.org/Platform/DevPlatform/CrossCompile/UsingMultiArch

* Infrastructure * Engineering views are now available for consumption by Linaro engineers and managers in Launchpad directly. e.g. https://launchpad.net/~linaro-infrastructure/+upcomingwork * We are now in the process of using custom AMIs preloaded with build dependencies for faster builds on android-build.linaro.org and ci.linaro.org services. * Publishing improvements to infrastructure include: builds with license protected binary blobs and builds with restricted access (OpenID based) * Bug fixes and improvements made to patches.linaro.org (now functioning) and to linaro-image-tools.

* Graphics * Added 2 new features to GLMmark2: running in fullscreen mode and some additional per-frame statistics (average time per frame rather than just the frames per second). * On the Graphics WG dashboard, multiple data series (for example from different sessions like Ubuntu/plain X/Android) can be displayed in the graphs.

* Multimedia * The gathering of 5.1 and 7.1 test audio files now complete. * UCM support on PulseAudio 2.0 updated. * Libjpeg-turbo updated to 1.2.1+svn837.

* Power Management * PowertTOP 2.0 made to work on ARM platforms * Patches sent upstream (in review). * package available in LInaro Ubuntu. * Work in progress on Android.

* Toolchain * Linaro GCC 4.7 2012.06, updated to GCC 4.7.0+svn188038 * Adds multilib support for use in the binary builds * Improves performance of 64 bit shifts in core registers * An off-by-one error in vrev * Linaro GCC 4.6 2012.06, updated to GCC 4.6.3+svn188320 * Uses the new /lib/ld-linux-armhf.so.3 loader for hard float binaries * Linaro GDB 7.4 2012.06, updated to GDB 7.4.1 code base * GDB now expands tildes in solib-search-path entries. * Linaro QEMU 1.1.0 2012-06, updated to QEMU 1.1.0 * Linaro Toolchain Binaries 2012.06 * Refine the system root

* Validation * lava-deployment-tool updated to use zc.buildout and provides greater reliablity in the management of server upgrades. * Serial port reset scripts developed to improve the reliability of device connections in the lab. * Dashboard bundle's now include a link to the job details, allowing users to easily find the raw logs from a test job. * Improvements made on timeouts handling in tests.

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

http://wiki.linaro.org/Cycles/1206/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

Note: tilt-tracking build (LEB) doesn't contain accelerated SGX support (only framebuffer video). For a full enablement support (graphics and multimedia), please use OMAPZoom build from our Developers and Community Builds section. In addition to those builds, a tilt-stable and an AOSP based builds are provided.

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/1206/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

-- Fathi Boudra, on behalf of the Release Team Linaro Release Manager | Validation Project Manager Linaro.org | Open source software for ARM SoCs