Linaro 12.04

Your talent determines what you can do. Your motivation determines how much you are willing to do. Your attitude determines how well you do it.

~Lou Holtz

We are pleased to announce the release of Linaro 12.04.

The Linaro 12.04 release highlights the precision, expertise and talent which all of the Linaro Teams – Working Groups, Landing Teams and Platform Teams – use to deliver influential updates and stimulating new features that are integrated on top of Android and Ubuntu. We, together with our members, partners and community continue to build upon the future of Linux on ARM and the 12.04 release is one more step in the excellent execution of those plans.

"This release integrates the ARM Fast Models. Using Fast Models enables us to engineer and test architectural features well before production silicon chips are available from our members. The most recent major project that is seeing the benefit of this is our work with big.LITTLE integrated kernel switching and KVM (using the Cortex-A15's virtualization mode)" said Linaro CTO David A Rusling, "these cycle-accurate architectural models are essential in our mission to avoid fragmentation and accelerate our member's time to market."

During the Linaro 12.04 release cycle the Developer Platform Team migrated the Linaro Evaluation Builds (LEB) to the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) based images. These new images are built for the ARM hard float (armhf) images and Linaro U-Boot is now based on the latest upstream release – v2012.04.1. Additionally, the Developer Platform images now provide support for the big.LITTLE integrated switcher and A15 Fast Models with KVM kernel, as well as testing coverage of the big.LITTLE project for both the reference and integrated switcher.

The Linaro Android team delivered the multimedia enablement for the Snowball and have updated all builds to AOSP ICS 4.0.4_r1.1. Also included as of this cycle are updated base toolchain components – MPFR and GMP. The Linaro Android Team ported stressapptest to Android for big.LITTLE Testing and like the Developer Platform team implemented and ran weekly big.LITTLE tests.

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.

Additional items of interest from the Linaro 12.04 release cycle include:

A 'Call for Demos' for the Linaro Connect Q2.12 Demo Friday Event was also announced.

The public is invited to attend and participate in this energetic and eclectic afternoon. Linaro, its partners, members and community, have created a great opportunity to view exciting demonstrations of Linaro builds running on a variety of ARM processor-based boards.

If you are interested in presenting a Demo during the Q2.12 Demo Friday event please see the Demo Friday webpage for more information on how to submit your demonstration.

As a reminder, registration is still open for the Linaro Connect Q2.12 event being held at the Gold Coast Hotel in Hong Kongfrom 28 May through 1 June, there is still time to register and join some of the best software developers from the Linaro ecosystem and contribute to the development and planning of the future of Linux on ARM.

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/1204/Release#Release_Information