“Coming together is a beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is success.“ ~ Henry Ford

The Linaro 12.08 release is now available!

The Linaro 12.08 release highlights the combined work 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 and Ubuntu during this development cycle. The 12.08 release is another example of how Linaro succesfully--together with its members, partners and community--continue to build the future of Linux on ARM.

12.08 was a very busy cycle for the Linaro Android platform team, "During the cycle our number one goal was to create stable Jelly Bean builds from AOSP for all of the platforms we support," said Zach Pfeffer, Tech Lead for the Linaro Android Team. "Not only did the team achieve this goal, but also continued to create a world class Android benchmarking platform, made it easier for people to connect their Jelly Bean based builds to the network by integrating the Ethernet Configuration Manager and automated many of the tests in the AOSP codebase," added Pfeffer. The Linaro Android team is already looking toward the Linaro 12.09 development cycle and according to Pfeffer, "We’re planning on getting each baseline working with Linaro’s linux-linaro upstream tracking kernel, continuing to improve our benchmarking infrastructure and maybe, just maybe having a very preliminary 64-bit Android build (fingers crossed)".

The Developer Platform Team announced USB Host enablement is now available in LAVA and that all packaged linux-linaro kernels are now cross-compiled and boot tested via LAVA before they are uploaded to Linaro Overlay PPA. Additionally, U-Boot-Linaro is now based on the latest upstream release--v2012.07.

We encourage everybody to use the 12.08 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 * Automated Methanol (http://gitorious.org/methanol) browser benchmarking in Linaro Android. * Automated over 100 Jelly Bean AOSP tests. * Integrated the Ethernet Connection Manager into Linaro Jelly Bean builds. * Running Linaro Jelly Bean on Versatile Express, Versatile Express RTSM, Samsung Origen, TI PandaBoard, ST Ericsson Snowball and Galaxy Nexus. * Released the Linaro Toolchain for Android, based on Linaro GCC 4.7-2012.08. * Updated Linaro Android to R4.1.1-R4. * Lowered native benchmark variance to 2% and JAVA benchmark variance to 5% for AndeBench, Antutu, CaffeineMark, Geekbench2, GLBenchmark, Linpack, Nbench, Quadrant and Vellamo. * Created a TINY_ANDROID baseline.

* Developer Platform * Linux Linaro is now tested and validated with CI, for all the supported flavours from the Landing Teams. * USB Host enablement testing is now available at LAVA, to help on USB support validation. * All packaged linux linaro kernels are cross compile tested and boot tested via LAVA before uploading them to Launchpad. * U-boot-Linaro is now based on the latest upstream release v2012.07.

* Infrastructure * Filesystem images are provided for Android builds to facilitate testing and streamlined deployment.

* Graphics and Multimedia * GLMark2: display benchmark results log in the Android GUI. * GLMark2: users can save and load benchmark lists from the Android GUI.

* Power Management * Add the concept of max_power and current_power to the scheduler to tie in DVFS.

* Toolchain * Fix partial-partial PRE since EEMBC bitmnp01 regressed significantly at -O3. Patch upstreamed and backported to Linaro GCC 4.7-2012.08

* Validation * Ubuntu FastModel's now executing bigLITTLE test suite in the lab. * OpenEmbedded images are bootable in LAVA. * WiFi antennas were added to the Snowball boards in the Validation lab to enable WiFi testing.

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

http://wiki.linaro.org/Cycles/1208/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/1208/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