"You will never do anything in this world without courage. It is the greatest quality of the mind next to honor." ~Aristotle

The Linaro 12.07 release is now available!

The Linaro 12.07 release highlights the quality, effort and 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 release cycle. The 12.07 release is another example of how Linaro, together with its members, partners and community continue to build upon the future of Linux on ARM one release and line of code at a time.

The LAVA team (http://www.linaro.org/about/meet-the-team/lava) added new test views for its daily testing processes as well as updates to the way its deployment tool works by implementing a new method which uses zc.buildout which works consistently and in a repeatably fashion. (http://www.linaro.org/linaro-blog/2012/07/24/lava-deployment-improvements/)

Linaro continues to make progress in big.LITTLE development as the ARM Landing Team (http://www.linaro.org/about/meet-the-team/arm-landing-team) delivers support for ARM TC2 (TestChip2) tile for the vexpress board. (TC2 is a big.LITTLE core with 2 Cortex A15 and 3 Cortex a7 processors). The Linaro Power Management group delivers its first submissions of big.LITTLE MP functionality (git://git.linaro.org/arm/big.LITTLE/mp.git) during the 12.07 release cycle as well.

The LAVA team was able to release the first boot log (https://plus.google.com/u/0/118153619948280443975/posts/V2dzB1PnP4r ) from the new big.LITTLE Versatile Express which is currently located in its LAVA lab. Additionally, the Developer Platform team reports that the Linaro ALIP is now using LXDE as the default enviroment, with a reduced image for better performance at ARM targets, such as Vexpress and FastModels. Linux Linaro updated on top of the latest upstream release (3.5), which reflects the latest changes and development available at Linaro, such as big.LITTLE MP.

The Linaro Android team added experimental baselines for the Galaxy Nexus (https://android-build.linaro.org/builds/~linaro-android/galaxynexus-jb-gcc47...) and Pandaboard (https://android-build.linaro.org/builds/~linaro-android/panda-jb-gcc47-tilt-...) as part of our ongoing Jelly Bean transition efforts. Also, deployed this month in LAVA were the Android benchmarking apps for Pandaboard, Snowball and Origen which included vellamo, quadrant, nbench, linpack, glbenchmark, geekbench, caffeinemark, antutu, and AndEBench.

In addition to these improvements the Developer Platform team notes that Kernel packages are updated to reflect the latest development trees from Linux Linaro (lct/ll-3.5 and llt-3.4) and the Landing Teams. CI jobs for the Ubuntu Kernel Packages are now cross compiled at Jenkings, then pushed directly to the Kernel PPA which reflects the reduction the time it takes for the kernel package to respin.

The Infrastructure, Graphics, Kernel, Multimedia, Toolchain, and Validation teams all had updates and new features added into this release which are covered in more detail on the release wiki.

Highlights of this release

* '''Android''' * Jellybean baselines for Galaxy and Panda with Linaro extra’s available * Android Benchmarking apps were deployed for pandaboard, snowball and origen in LAVA including: vellamo, quadrant, nbench, linpack, glbenchmark, geekbench, caffeinemark, antutu, andebench * Improved native Benchmarks variance on Android to 1%, working on Java variance * ICS “tests” builds now produced by default and test lists generated * Open overlay tarballs working * pm-qa’s cpuidle cpufreq cpuhotplug sched_mc suspend integrated into the Android builds * Linaro Android Snowball 4.0.4 is now in par with Snowball 4.0.3

* '''Developer Platform''' * Linaro ALIP is now using LXDE as the default enviroment, with a reduced image for better performance at ARM targets, such as Vexpress and FastModels. * Kernel packages updated to reflect the latest development trees from Linux Linaro (lct/ll-3.5 and llt-3.4) and the Landing Teams * CI jobs for the Ubuntu Kernel Packages are now cross compiled at Jenkings once succesfull it's pushed directly to the Kernel PPA, reducing the kernel package respin time considerably. * Linux Linaro updated on top of the latest upstream release (3.5), and also reflecting the latest changes and development available at Linaro, such as big.LITTLE MP. * OpenEmbedded ready targets for minimal and LAMP stacks compatible with ARMv7 are now available, generated automatically by ci.linaro.org and with images available at snapshots.linaro.org * U-Boot-Linaro updated with fixes for Omap 4 (Pandaboard) and also with the latest PXE-related changes from upstream. * Cross toolchain packages updated at both Ubuntu Quantal and Toolchain Backports PPA to reflect the latest version available.

* '''Infrastructure''' * Linaro image tools now supports multiple boards and multiple bootloaders on a single hardware pack. * Build information can now be defined and exported for external use. * Create a skeleton Django-based web application for the CI dashboard with basic web serving, API framework, persistence layer and OpenID-based authentication and ACLs. * Click through license protection supports EULA versioning and branding and OpenID authentication.

* '''Graphics''' * glmark2 * Add Android GUI for defining and running benchmarks. * Add benchmark based on the WebGL jellyfish demo (scene 'jellyfish'). * Add benchmark based on the WebGL dynamic terrain demo (scene 'terrain'). * Extend texture scene with the option to compute texture coordinates in the shader (option 'texgen'). * Add support for reading texture data from JPEG files. * Properly support options that have a finite set of acceptable values. * glcompbench * New 'scale' test to simulate window manager scaling effect. * Enhancements to test options for existing tests.

* '''Power Management''' * b.L MP tree integrated into linux-linaro but not enabled for TC2 due to unrelated last-minute problems for ARM LT * Bug fixes to PM-QA tests to not run if feature is not found

* '''Toolchain''' * Linaro GCC 4.7 2012.07 is the fourth release in the 4.7 series. Based off the latest GCC 4.7.0+svn189098 release, it includes performance improvements around choice of auto-increment based addressing modes for floating point values. * Updates to GCC 4.7.0+svn189098 * Implements improvements to ivopts selection of addressing modes of floating point values.

* '''Validation''' * Added support for Android FastModels in LAVA * Created a new QA test view for daily testing

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

http://wiki.linaro.org/Cycles/1207/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/1207/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