Linaro 12.11

One way to keep momentum going is to have constantly greater goals.

~Michael Korda

The Linaro 12.11 release is now available!

The Linaro 12.11 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 12.11 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.

Looking over the highlights from the 12.11 release cycle, it's easy to see how the momemtum and energy from LCE12-Copenhagen carries over and our teams consistantly meet and exceed the goals set in the Linaro Connect sessions. Our Android team has updated the platform to AOSP 4.2 on all our supported boards, and Android evdev is now upstreamed and used in AOSP 4.2.

As we look over improvements to the Linaro toolchain, it is notable that Linaro GCC now includes the arm/aarch64-4.7-branch (ARMv8). The Developer Platform team reports that the initial GRUB support for ARM is now available, provided by our Linaro Enterprise Group and marking its first component delivery.

The Power Management Working Group continues its progress on big.LITTLE MP by delivering the v11 and v12 branches, as the Graphics Working Group notes that there is a new GLMark2 release which demonstrates shadow mapping. Additionally our LAVA team reports that the NI Battery Simulator is now available in the lab and can now be accessed remotely.

"Linaro 12.11 includes a number of important contributions from the engineering teams, most significant are the v11 and v12 releases of the big.LITTLE MP tree. These releases integrate a number of feature patches required for commercial products in 2013. It is very satisfying to know the work our teams do will be put to good use in great products developed by our member companies," said Mark Orvek, Director, Kernel Working Group at Linaro.

"Bernhard Rosenkranzer developed a very exciting demo of a native VI editor and native gcc compilers running on Android for Connect. Perf support on android is improved and is now on the linux-linaro tree and builds for Origen 4412 were set up." said Zach Pfeffer, Linaro Android Tech Lead.

With 13 companies joining Linaro to become part of the newly formed and announced Linaro Enterprise Group (LEG), excitment continues to grow around the opportunity to accelerate developement in the Linux ARM server ecosystem. In a video interview during the 12.11 release cycle, Linaro's Director of LEG, Andrea Gallo, gave a more indepth explaination of what this new group is, how it works, and why the formation of LEG is important.

"LEG has been focused on creating our roadmap and drafting the first cards as we continue to build on the work that David Rusling initiated as part of the OCTO enterprise pre-work," said Gallo. "We've been busy working with ARM and Samsung on extending the Tianocore UEFI support to the Samsung platform beyond the multiple ARM Versatile Express variants already in place. Many thanks to Ryan Harkin, the Linaro ARM Landing team and Rony Nandy of Samsung for all their help and collaboration. Also, we are planning an invitation only UEFI mini-summit which is scheduled to take place on the 11-13 of December at the Linaro office in Cambridge," added Gallo." For more information please follow the Linaro enterprise mailing list and other Linaro social media outlets.

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/1211/Release#Release_Information