Linaro 12.12

Identify your problems but give your power and energy to solutions.

~Tony Robbins

The Linaro 12.12 release is now available!

The Linaro 12.12 release highlights energy 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 12.12 release rounds out a great year of successes that prove how the collaborative efforts of Linaro, together with its members, partners and community continue to build upon the future of Linux on ARM.

"Just look at the engineering that Linaro has been involved with. big.LITTLE, kernel consolidation, UMM, ARMv8 and the list goes on. Its not just hacking code though, Linaro is thinking carefully about itself, re-engineering itself for the next phase in its evolution. Start up was 2010, Establishment was 2011 and 2012 has been Growth. Whats 2013 going to be all about? Just wait and see," said David Rusling, Linaro CTO in his 2012 year end summary.

The 12.12 release highlights include the Linaro Android team has upgraded its builds to to 4.2.1, enabled WiFi on PandaBoard for 4.2.1 and audio on the Origen 4210. Additionally the team released its 12.12 toolchain this cycle. Earlier this month, the 3.7 Linux Kernel was released and the Linaro Android team rebased the perf patches.

As we look at the achievements of the Linaro Developer Platform, we note that the Linaro baseline images for Ubuntu are now based on Quantal Quetzal otherwise known as Ubuntu 12.10 and initiate the transition from Evaluation Builds to Engineering Builds. The Linaro U-Boot 2012.12 which is based on U-Boot v2013.01-rc1 was released and includes support for Origen quad (4412) and Arndale (5250) boards.

The Linaro Power Management team had a very busy cycle: optimizing big.LITTLE IKS(In Kernel Switcher) for release to members, integrating the big.LITTLE MP via the Intergration tree, adding improvements to help solve tasking packing around the power-aware scheduler, IKS and MP benchmarking for power and performance, adding thermal framework enhancements for non-ACPI platforms, updating Powertop for ARM platforms and adding cpuidle support for multi-cluster SoCs

The Linaro Toolchain Team announced updates: Linaro GCC 4.7 2012.12 was released and is based off GCC 4.7.2+svn194184 which gives better 64 bit shifts in NEON, updates the arm/aarch64-4.7-branch up to svn revision 194154. Linaro Toolchain Binaries for 2012.12 was released and updated to latest Linaro GCC 4.7 2012.12 and Linaro GDB 7.5 2012.12.

LAVA has seen updates and improvements this cycle as well as support for the 4.2.1 Linaro Android images were added, Other improvements on the LAVA front include increases IP address space from 255 to 65k in the lab, image reports for the automated testing of OpenEmbedded builds is now available, a new server was added tothe validation lab for audio, power measurement, and SD-mux capable devices. LAVA can now execute Versatile Express jobs using the test images DTB and VExpress-tc2 boards have been converted to use IKS. A 64-bit virtual machine was added to lava-cloud for the Linaro Toolchain team's use as well. The user interface for finding, viewing and downloading attachments in the LAVA dashboard was improved and signal handlers can be written in shell and bundled with the tests themselves.

Even as the physical year comes to a close Linaro continues to identify problems, obstacles, and opportunites to put its power and energy into to end 2012 on a high note and start 2013 off with solutions and goals for the future.

The Linaro Enterprise Group (LEG) which was announced in November at TechCon set some very agressive goals and is pleased to announce its 12.12 release preview which include completed investigation of CRC32 for HDFS optimisation, ported and submitted Non-Uniform Memory Access patches to upstream, enabled GRUB on U-boot and UEFI on the Samsung Arndale board. More information on LEG release preview can be found on the wiki

Other Highlights and items of interest for this developement cycle are that we have announced the dates and open registration for Linaro Connect Asia 2013 (LCA13) which will be held on 4-8 March at the Gold Coast Hotel in Hong Kong. Register early as the registration window for this event will close prior to the start of the event. More information about LCA13 can be found here and on the Linaro website.

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/1212/Release#Release_Information