Linaro 12.09

There is a real magic in enthusiasm. It spells the difference between mediocrity and accomplishment.

~Norman Vincent Peale

The Linaro 12.09 release is now available!

The Linaro 12.09 release cycle highlights the combined work and enthusiasm of all the Linaro Teams Working Groups, Landing Teams andPlatform Teams who have provided all the updates and new features that are integrated on top of Android and Ubuntu during this development cycle. The 12.09 release is another example of how Linaro succesfullytogether with its members, partners and communitycontinue to build the future of Linux on ARM.

Zach Pfeffer, the Linaro Android Team Tech Lead, explains to the Linaro Release team what he and his team have accomplished during this cycle. Linaros patches to AOSP are now available on Jelly Bean and Linaro Android users should now see a 15% performance bump in their Android builds when combined with the Linaro toolchain. Developers now have another MALI based accelerated platform to work with as the Snowball graphics enablement is now available on the Linaro Jelly Bean build. The team also analyzed 10 of the most popular Android benchmarking tools: AndEBench, AndEBench Java, Linpack, CaffeineMark, Antutu 2D and 3D, NBench, Quadrant, I/O Benchmark and Vellamo. Additionally, the team has put together the NI PXIe-4154 based power measurement system which will allow the instrument to be easily integrated into LAVA. Also there is now an AOSP test automation framework that is able to automatically read and execute in-tree AOSP tests.

"During the 12.09 cycle the team started early work on a minimal ARMv8 bootstrap, and we already have a very minimal rootfs with some parts to help other developers that want to get involved with the porting," says Ricardo Salveti, Developer Platform Team Tech Lead. "This work will be critical for the future of Linux on ARMv8, as the major GNU/Linux distributions can use it as base to bootstrap and support this new architechture." In addition to the work highlighted by Salveti, the Developer Platform team also updated the kernel and test components for the big.LITTLE project, made substantial progress on the Debian/Ubuntu Perl and Python multi-arch/cross-build support, and noted that hardware packs for Versatile Express, Origen and PandaBoard now include the support for UEFI and can be selected while flashing the image with linaro-media-tools.

Linaro would also like to to remind everyone that Linaro Connect (LCE 12 Copenhagen) is less than 5 weeks away and registration is open. LCE 12 Copenhagen will be held from 29 Oct to 2 Nov at the Bella Center in Copenhagen, Demark. In addition to the regular track sessions, LCE 12 will host three mini summits: an ARMv8 (64-bit) mini-summit on the Tuesday, an Android mini-summit on the Wednesday and a big.LITTLE mini-summit on the Thursday. For those who are attending already and would like to or are planning on providing a demo for our Demo Friday the 'Call for Participation' is now open. More information about this and other Linaro events can be found on the Linaro Connect website. What are you waiting for join Linaro in Copenhagen for LCE 12. Dont forget; register today!

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/1209/Release#Release_Information