Linaro 12.10

A dream doesn't become reality through magic; it takes sweat, determination and hard work.

~Colin Powell

The Linaro 12.10 release is now available!

The Linaro 12.10 release cycle highlights the determination and hard 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 12.10 release is another example of how Linaro works together with its members, partners and community to continue to build the future of Linux on ARM.

In addition to the successful release of Linaro 12.10, the plans for the upcoming Linaro Connect (LCE 12 -Copenhagen) have been finalized as well. Added to the Connect schedule will be three mini-summits which focus on Android, ARMv8 (64 bit) and big.LITTLE. The summits showcase the exciting work that is now being seen in the 12.10 release cycle.

"The Linaro 12.10 release was a foundational cycle for the Linaro Android Team and included Connect preparations, target refinement and test and benchmark automation work, " said Zach Pfeffer, Android Team Tech Lead. He added, "All of these areas will prepare the team for a strong Connect, better target support and our upcoming push to more actively improve AOSP."

On the ARMv8 front, Linaro is now making early ARMv8 images available to interested developers. For a primer on the ARMv8 architecture, the AArch64 execution state and the A64 instruction set, please visit the ARM portal. While there is currently no ARMv8 hardware available, ARM and Linaro have developed support for AArch64/A64 against virtual platforms and started sending the resulting patches to various open source projects. With the Linaro provided downloads and with ARMs Fast Models virtual platform, you may boot a virtual ARMv8 system and run 64-bit binaries. These downloads are currently in beta, but they should just work and we are looking towards including them as part of our monthly releases. For more information on these ARMv8 images please take a look at the Linaro Engineer pages on the Linaro website.

Work on big.LITTLE continues as the Linaro Kernel Working Group highlights its completion of TC2 support; noting that TC2 now boots with the latest IKS tree. Five new test cases have been added to handle simultaneous thread switching, important bugs such as Switcher Thumb-2 bug and Switcher deadlock issue when working on the memblock_steal(), vlock remaining locked under certain conditions were fixed along with and updated focus to run benchmarks with the latest IKS on TC2 to find optimization opportunities.

While some wondered if the idea of a consolidated kernel in the ARM ecosystem would remain a dream and something developers only longed for, the Linaro Kernel Working Group continues to work toward making that dream a reality and during the 12.10 Linaro development cycle announced that they will demo their work on their continued efforts on the single zImage kernel. Mark Orvek, Director for the Kernel Working Group at Linaro in a Google+ Hangout on Air discussion hinted to what attendees could expect to see at the LCE 12 -Copenhagen Demo Friday event. Orvek indicated that Deepak Saxena would be demo'ing a single kernel across several member boards. The full recorded Hangout is available on youtube.

For those who will be at LCE 12 - Copenhagen next week (29 Oct - 2 Nov) we look forward to seeing you there; however, if you are unable to attend, but would like to participate we are offering remote participation. Visit the Linaro Connect website to find out how you or someone you know can participate remotely.

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/1210/Release#Release_Information