Linaro Blog

Be a show off! Demo and Poster Opportunities available at LCA13 in Hong Kong

Posted on January 10, 2013 by

Call for Participation!

Linaro is excited to announce that we will once again host a Demo Friday event at LCA13 – Hong Kong to showcase the latest Linux developments on ARM. Linaro members, partners and community will offer interactive demonstrations which showcase the combination ARM based processor boards and Linaro builds of Android, Ubuntu and more.

What is Demo Friday?

Demo Friday is a two-hour event that will showcase new and innovative ways Linaro members, partners and community are using various Linaro builds and other Linaro based code on ARM based processor boards. Demo Friday will take place on Friday, March 8, 2013 at Gold Coast Hotel in Hong Kong (Exact time and location to be determined). Demo Friday is open to the public. This is an exciting and educational opportunity for everyone to get a hands on demonstration of what Linaro is enabling with ARM based processor boards for Linux on ARM.

Poster Program Added

New to our Demo Friday event will be a Poster Program.  This program is for those who would like to let attendees know how they or their organization is using Linaro code and ARM based processors, but can’t actually bring the equipment to the Linaro Connect event.

More information on this program can be found here.

Previous Demonstrations

Previous demonstration events have included Kinnect-face robot recognizing human faces, Linaro Android Build Service, Automated Validation Infrastructure for Android system, XBMC running on a Snowball board, Ubuntu TV on a Pandaboard, Quick Start board demos and more. More about past events can be found here and video of past Demo Friday events are also available on the Linaro YouTube Channel.

How to participate

All companies and engineers who are using Linaro on ARM based processor boards are invited to participate in Demo Friday with either a demo or a poster and highlight their work. Demonstrations and Posters for the Demo Friday event have not yet been finalized and there are opportunities to add more to the line-up. Anyone interested in this opportunity to participate can email the details of their demonstration to: connect@linaro.org. Please put “LCA13 Demo Friday Submission” in the subject line.

When emailing please include the following information:

  • Name
  • Company
  • Title of demonstration or Poster
  • Description of demonstration or Poster (The demonstration/poster must be Linaro related, and those presenting the demonstration/poster should be able to tell attendees how Linaro is making their product or demonstration better)
  • Any equipment requirements (Demo only)
  • Participants must be available to set up their demonstration prior to the start of the event and immediately after event ends. If you are entering a poster a representative for the project or organization must be with the poster at the event to answer questions)

Demo Friday details can be found on the Linaro Connect Site.

Sponsorship Opportunities Still Available

LCA13 – Hong Kong will be take place at the Gold Coast Hotel in Hong Kong on March 4 -10 and sponsorship opportunities are still available. More information about levels and benefits of Linaro Connect sponsorship can be found here.

Register Today

While Demo Friday is open to the public we would like to encourage everyone to join us for the full week of LCA13.  Many demos are refined and patched during the week as participants have the opportunity to work with top industry developers during the many hacking sessions throughout the week.

What are you waiting for? Register today and join us in Hong Kong for the 2013 Linaro Connect Asia Event (LCA13).

About

Linaro

Linaro is the place where engineers from the world’s leading technology companies define the future of Linux on ARM. The company is a not-for-profit engineering organization with over 120 engineers working on consolidating and optimizing open source software for the ARM architecture, including developer tools, the Linux kernel, ARM power management, and other software infrastructure.

To find out more, please visit http://www.linaro.org.

Linaro Connect

Over 300 participants, ranging from kernel hackers to integration engineers to ARM SoC industry executives gather during this week long to present, discuss and develop features,  infrastructure and optimizations for the Linux kernel, Android, Ubuntu and beyond.

To find out more, please visit the Linaro Connect Website.

Follow Linaro

To find out more about what is happening in and around Linaro  following us on Twitter, Google+ and Facebook.

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Linaro big.LITTLE Mini-Summit Summary

Posted on January 7, 2013 by

The Linaro big.LITTLE Mini-Summit that was held on Thursday, 1 November, 2012 as part of Linaro Connect Europe (LCE) 2012 at the Bella Center in Copenhagen, Denmark.

big.LITTLE Mini-Summit information

The big.LITTLE mini-summit followed the same format as both the Android and ARMv8(64-bit) mini-summits with opening plenary and a lightning talk followed by four planning and discussion sessions.

Those four sessions included topics focused on the following:

  • A big.LITTLE status update and Making Linux work with asymmetric systems
  • The Bluesky session: What would the ideal power-aware kernel do?
  • Back to reality: What do we have today and the sequence of steps to get to where we want to be
  • Workloads and Test Automation and General Discussions on further work and Wrap-Up

ARMs Test Chip 2(TC#2): An Overview Slide Used during Mini-Summit

During the two plenary sessions, Amit Kucheria (PMWG Tech Lead at Linaro) and Robin Randhawa (Power Management Architect at ARM) highlighted some of the interesting experimental results coming out of the research being done around power management and big.LITTLE inside Linaro and ARM.

They touched upon the two big.LITTLE (b.L) modes – IKS and MP, current implementation status, performance and power numbers being observed with ARM’s TC2 boards and further work required.

The key take-away message from these talks was that initial power and performance numbers on the ARM TC2 hardware (2 A15 + 3 A7) prove the efficacy of the b.L hardware concept and establish a baseline to improve upon. For example, a web-browsing + mp3 usecase in b.L IKS mode ran at 90% of the performance while consuming only 60% of the power compared to the same use case running purely on an A15 system. The b.L MP case was showed similar numbers in measurements inside Linaro (ARM’s results were missing some A15 quiescing patches at the time of the summit, thus yielding much higher power numbers. This has been fixed since then).

The highly technical sessions were dedicated to finding solutions to known problems in Linux that will allow it to work more efficiently on b.L hardware. These problems included:

  1. IKS optimisations
    1. To minimise interrupt blackout
    2. To profile and optimise the cpufreq driver
  2. Speeding up Hotplug
  3. CPU quiescence
    1. RCU callbacks on A15s are expensive
    2. Adaptive NOHZ patchset
  4. Scheduler optimisations
    1. Scheduler-driven optimal C-state and P-state selection
    2. Scale invariance of load
    3. Ways to differentiate processes to
      1. Improve response times e.g. application launch
      2. Constrain a process to LITTLE cores
    4. Consolidate load calculation heuristics required by various governors into the scheduler
  5. Automation of power/performance testing on real hardware

While the b.L IKS solution is members-only at this point, the b.L MP development can be tracked through a public git tree and through announcements on the linaro-dev mailing list.

For more information about each of these sessions and how you can get involved, see the links below for the full session notes. Where available, links to slides (pdf) and videos of the sessions are listed.

  • big.LITTLE Mini-Summit Overview – Slides (Plenary 1 and 2 are also included in this slide deck) Video (includes Plenary 1 and 2)
  • big.LITTLE Mini-Summit  Session 1 (A big.LITTLE status update and Making Linux work with asymmetric systems)  -  Video, Notes
  • big.LITTLE Mini-Summit Session 2 (The Bluesky session: What would the ideal power-aware kernel do?)  - Slides, Video, Notes
  • big.LITTLE Mini-Summit Session 3 (Back to reality: What do we have today and the sequence of steps to get to where we want to be) – Video, Notes
  • big.LITTLE Mini-Summit Session 4 (Workloads and Test Automation and General Discussions on further work and Wrap-Up) – Video, Notes

What is big.Little Processing?

According to ARM’s big.LITTLE webpage it is described as, “big.LITTLE processing addresses one of today’s industry challenges: how to create a System on Chip (SoC) that provides both high performance as well as extreme power efficiency to extend battery life. big.LITTLE connects the performance of the ARM Cortex-A15 or Cortex-A57 processor with the energy efficiency of the Cortex-A7 or Cortex-A53 processors respectively, enabling the same application software to switch seamlessly between them. By selecting the optimum processor for each task, big.LITTLE can extend battery life by up to 70%.”  - From the ARM website on big.LITTLE Processing

More about big.LITTLE and Linaro can be found at: https://wiki.linaro.org/WorkingGroups/Kernel/Big.Little.Switcher

LCE12 – Resources

Additional presentations and videos from LCE12-Copenhagen can be found on the resources page of the Linaro Connect website at: http://www.linaro.org/connect-resources/Q/lce12

Downloads

Information and links to all Linaro builds can be found on the Linaro website on the downloads page.

Linaro Connect

More information on the upcoming Linaro Connect event (Linaro Connect Asia (LCA) 2013) can be found on the the Linaro Connect Website.

Staying Connected

You can also stay in touch with what is happening in around Linaro by following us on Twitter, Google+ and Facebook.

About:

The Linaro Power Management Team

  • The Power Management WG will look at the entire software stack (kernel, middleware, applications and tools) to help optimize power consumption. The WG is responsible for creating infrastructure, guidelines and tools to enable top-notch power management on multiple ARM SoCs.
  • Meeting: Weekly IRC meeting
  • Mailing List: Upstream Discussions – LKML, linux-arm-kernel, linux-pm@lists.linux-foundation.organd Announcements – mailto:linaro-dev@lists.linaro.org (subscribe)
  • IRC Channel: #linaro on irc.linaro.org or irc.freenode.net
  • Team Members

More information about the Linaro Power Management Team can be found at: https://wiki.linaro.org/WorkingGroups/PowerManagement

Linaro

To find out more, please visit: http://www.linaro.org.

Posted in Community, Connect Events, Hardware, Linaro | Leave a comment

Linaro Hangouts on Air: Openness, Why it is Not Optional

Posted on December 28, 2012 by

UPDATE: The time for this hangout has been changed to 18:00UTC/1300EST/10:00PST.

Mark your calendars, add Linaro OnAir to your Google+ Circles and plan on joining the discussion in our Bi-Monthly Hangouts where topics are suggestions and the conversations are limited only by the host(s) and guest(s). However, most of these conversations will be tied to Linaro, ARM, Open Source and other topics suggested by our developers, members, and community, so tell us what you want to discuss.

Our first 2013 Hangout on Air  is scheduled for Monday, 7 January at 13:00 UTC 18:00 UTC and the topic of discussion will be ‘openness, why it is not optional‘ with Linaro CTO, David Rusling and Tim Wesselman of HP’s HyperScale Business Unit.

We are still ironing out the details and lining up the guests for the other hangouts in 2013, but as soon as we lock in the topics of discussion and the guests we will announce those here on the Linaro Blog, across our social media and create a Google+ event as well.

More about the ‘Openness, Why it is Not Optional’ Hangout can be found on our Linaro OnAir Event Page.

To stay up to date with upcoming Linaro Hangouts on Air be sure to add Linaro OnAir to your circles.  You can also find out more about what is happening in and around Linaro by following us on Twitter, circling us on  Google+ and liking us Facebook.

Do you have a topic suggestion for our Hangouts On Air?  Is there a guest you would like to attend and contribute to the discussion; then let us know.

Posted in Community, Hangouts on Air, Linaro | Leave a comment

LEG Engineers Discuss UEFI: Updates, Goals and Getting Involved

Posted on December 21, 2012 by

A UEFI Mini-Sprint was held at the Linaro offices in Cambridge UK on 11-13 December.

Rony Nandy, Enterprise Server Engineer for the Linaro Enterprise Group (LEG) summed up the Sprint in a blog post this week. Nandy writes in his post that during the this mini-sprint problems such as a location for all the board support for edk2(UEFI) on ARM were fixed.  The maintainer-ship structure for UEFI on ARM was also discussed and goals for UEFI on ARM in 2013 were put in motion.

LEG Engineers held a public Hangout on Air where they discussed UEFI updates, future goals and how to get involved.

Participants for this hangout included Andrea Gallo, Director of LEG who opened the Hangout and facilitated the discussion. David Rusling, Linaro, CTO gave feedback and Grant Likely, Technical Architect discussed the various goals that were achieved at the mini-sprint.

Engineers from and ARM and Linaro had the opportunity to add their thoughts and insights to the discussion. From ARM were Leif Lindholm  and Olivier Martin with Ryan Harkin, Tech Lead for the ARM Landing Team and  Anmar Oueja, Technical Program Manager from Linaro rounding out the Hangout.

The formation of LEG was announced in early November.  As part of the announcement initial work and goals were outlined.  ”Linaro expects initial software delivery before the end of 2012 with ongoing releases thereafter,” and yesterday LEG announced it meet that goal and released its Engineering Preview.

UEFI is only one part of the roadmap that LEG will be working on in 2013.

Linaro Enterprise Group (LEG) Roadmap

More information about LEG and its goals and release schedule can be found on the Linaro Website and Wiki pages.

To get involved with LEG and help plan the future of Linux on ARM in 2013 consider joining us at our next Linaro Connect event LCA13 which will be held on 4-8 March at the Gold Coast Hotel in Hong Kong. Registration for this event is now open.

About

Linaro Enterprise Group (LEG)

The Linaro-hosted “Enterprise Group” (LEG) is dedicated to accelerate Linux ARM server ecosystem development and extends the list of Linaro members beyond ARM silicon vendors to Server OEM’s and commercial Linux providers.

To find out more, please visit http://www.linaro.org/engineering/leg

About Linaro

Linaro is the place where engineers from the world’s leading technology companies define the future of Linux on ARM. The company is a not-for-profit engineering organization with over 120 engineers working on consolidating and optimizing open source software for the ARM architecture, including developer tools, the Linux kernel, ARM power management, and other software infrastructure.

To find out more, please visit http://www.linaro.org.

About Linaro Connect

Over 300 participants, ranging from kernel hackers to integration engineers to ARM SoC industry executives gather during this week long to present, discuss and develop features,  infrastructure and optimizations for the Linux kernel, Android, Ubuntu and beyond.

To find out more, please visit Linaro Connect Website.

Posted in Community, Linaro | Leave a comment

Linaro Enterprise Group (LEG) Releases its 12.12 “Engineering Preview”

Posted on December 20, 2012 by

Linaro Enterprise Group (LEG) Meets Aggressive Release Goals – the 12.12 “Engineering Preview” Release is Now Available

The Linaro Enterprise Group (LEG) which was announced earlier this year, today meets its goal of delivering its initial software before the end of 2012 and announces its first release[1]–a LEG ‘Engineering Preview” Release.

Today’s LEG release is being done in parallel with the Linaro 12.12 release. Download information for the Linaro 12.12 release can be found at: http://www.linaro.org/downloads/

This is the first release of Linaro Enterprise Group (LEG). This release is meant to be an engineering preview of the great collaborative work done by LEG and its partners over the past two months.

Release Highlights include CRC32, Compression Analysis, NUMA, HugePages, GRUB on ARM, and Ubuntu 12.04 Server for the Samsung Arndale Board.

In addition to the collaboration with Canonical on Ubuntu, LEG is also preparing to synchronize developments with Red Hat on its initial Fedora bootstrap for the ARMv8 (64bit) Foundation model.

Full details of this release, can be found on the LEG release wiki page at: https://wiki.linaro.org/LEG/Engineering/Releases/12.12

This is an engineering preview and should NOT be used for production purposes.

GETTING INVOLVED
More information on Linaro can be found on our websites:

Also subscribe to the LEG mailing list and join our IRC channel to stay on top of Linaro developments:

For individuals or organizations who wish to get involved with LEG, please consider joining us at our next Linaro Connect Event–Linaro Connect Asia 2013 (LCA13) at the Gold Coast Hotel in Hong Kong on 4-8 March.  This is your opportunity to help build the future of Linux on ARM.  Registration for this event is now open.

Between development cycles you can stay up to date with all the latest news in an around Linaro by following us on Twitter, Google+ and Facebook.

[1]The 2013 LEG release schedule has yet to be finalized; however; you can follow our wiki page for all the latest updates.

About

Linaro Enterprise Group (LEG)

The Linaro-hosted “Enterprise Group” (LEG) is dedicated to accelerate Linux ARM server ecosystem development and extends the list of Linaro members beyond ARM silicon vendors to Server OEM’s and commercial Linux providers.

To find out more, please visit http://www.linaro.org/engineering/leg

About Linaro

Linaro is the place where engineers from the world’s leading technology companies define the future of Linux on ARM. The company is a not-for-profit engineering organization with over 120 engineers working on consolidating and optimizing open source software for the ARM architecture, including developer tools, the Linux kernel, ARM power management, and other software infrastructure.

To find out more, please visit http://www.linaro.org.

About Linaro Connect

Over 300 participants, ranging from kernel hackers to integration engineers to ARM SoC industry executives gather during this week long to present, discuss and develop features,  infrastructure and optimizations for the Linux kernel, Android, Ubuntu and beyond.

More information on upcoming Linaro Connect events can be found on the  Linaro Connect Website.

Posted in Linaro, Releases | Leave a comment

Linaro 12.12 Release Now Available

Posted on December 20, 2012 by

Identify your problems but give your power and energy to solutions. ~Tony Robbins

We are pleased to announce that Linaro 12.12 is now available and ready for download.

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.  It’s 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”.  What’s 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 inititiate 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 and 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 engineering preview release which includes 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 at: https://wiki.linaro.org/LEG/Engineering/Releases/12.12

Other Highlights and items of interest for this release cycle are that we have announced the dates and opened registration for Linaro Connect Asia 2013 (LCA13) which will be held at the Gold Coast Hotel in Hong Kong on 4-8 March. 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.

Between development cycles you can stay up to date with all the latest news in an around Linaro by following us on Twitter, Google+ and Facebook.

USING THE ANDROID-BASED IMAGES

The Android-based images come in three parts: system, userdata and boot. These need to be combined to form a complete Android install. For an explanation of how to do this please see:

If you are interested in getting the source and building these images yourself please see the following pages:

USING THE UBUNTU-BASED IMAGES

The Ubuntu-based images consist of two parts. The first part is a hardware pack, which can be found under the hwpacks directory and contains hardware specific packages (such as the kernel and bootloader). The second part is the rootfs, which is combined with the hardware pack to create a complete image. For more information on how to create an image please see:

GETTING INVOLVED

More information on Linaro can be found on our websites:

Also subscribe to the important Linaro mailing lists and join our IRC channels to stay on top of Linaro developments:

KNOWN ISSUES WITH THIS RELEASE

For any errata issues, please see:

Bug reports for this release should be filed in Launchpad against the individual packages that are affected. If a suitable package cannot be identified, feel free to assign them to:

About Linaro

Linaro is the place where engineers from the world’s leading technology companies define the future of Linux on ARM. The company is a not-for-profit engineering organization with over 120 engineers working on consolidating and optimizing open source software for the ARM architecture, including developer tools, the Linux kernel, ARM power management, and other software infrastructure.

To find out more, please visit http://www.linaro.org.

About Linaro Connect

Over 300 participants, ranging from kernel hackers to integration engineers to ARM SoC industry executives gather during this week long to present, discuss and develop features,  infrastructure and optimizations for the Linux kernel, Android, Ubuntu and beyond.

To find out more, please visit Linaro Connect Website.

Posted in Linaro, Releases | Leave a comment

Registration Opens for Linaro Connect Asia 2013 – Book Early!

Posted on December 19, 2012 by

Announcing Linaro Connect Asia 2013

We’re thrilled to announce that event registration and hotel booking at the Gold Coast Hotel in Hong Kong is now available for  the Linaro Connect Asia 2013 (LCA13) – Hong Kong event  – the industry’s foremost event for developing Linux on ARM— scheduled to be held on  4 – 8 March 2013. Book early because registration is limited. To book the hotel you will need to download the booking form (odt and doc formats) and email it to: reservations@goldcoasthotel.com.hk If you have question about booking your hotel accommodations please send an email to connect@linaro.org.

This intensive week will involve the best software developers participating in discussion and planning in the morning, hacking sessions in the afternoon and socialising in the evening.

For LCA13 Track participants can expect the track sessions throughout the week to include:

  • Server
  • Android
  • Graphics and multimedia
  • Kernel
  • Engineering builds
  • Power Management
  • QA
  • Infrastructure
  • Tools
  • Validation and LAVA
  • Training

In addition to theses track sessions, LCA13 will include a number of mini-summits, including a Server mini-summit hosted by the Linaro Enterprise Group (LEG).  More mini-summits will be announced as they are added to the schedule.  Check the schedule page on Linaro Connect to see the latest updates.

What did you miss at the last Connect?

LCE12 – Copenhagen took place from 29 October to 2 November in Copenhagen, Denmark with more than 300 delegates from over 80 companies. Included below are some highlights from this event  which give a nice overview of what happens at our Linaro Connect event:

3 Mini – Summits

Session Tracks

Demo Friday Event

  • Linaro – Linaro-Linux Kernel Demo – Various Member Boards
  • Linaro – Galaxy Nexus with Linaro Improvements Programming Station
  • Linaro – NI Power Measurement of Android
  • Linaro – Benchmark and Hotspot Automation
  • Linaro –  Android/Standard Linux on Galaxy Nexus
  • SIProp – 3D copy machine
  • Samsung LT – Android on Insignal Origna Quad Core Low Cost Board running Samsung Exynos 4412 SoC
  • Texas Instruments LT – ARM energy probe + Linaro software demo
  • JogAmp Community – JogAmp graphics, audio, media and processing libraries

Announcements

Why come to Linaro Connect?

Are you passionate about – or are just wanting to get involved in – the latest Linux on ARM developments, then this is a key event for you! You will be defining the ARM tools, Linux kernels and builds of key Linux distributions, including Android and Ubuntu, on our member and other ARM SoCs.

Linaro Connect is also an ideal event to attend for technical executives interested in investing into Linaro. The Linaro management team is available throughout the week to introduce you to the company and explain the many benefits of collaboration for your company and market situation. If you would like to meet with a member of the management team during LCA13 please send an email to contactus@linaro.org prior to the event so that a meeting during the event can be arranged.

Finally, sponsorship of LCA13  is now available, with a variety of great packages.  Email connect@linaro.org for more details.

Posted in Community, Connect Events, Industry, Linaro | Leave a comment

UEFI mini-sprint at Cambridge from 11-13 Dec 2012

Posted on December 19, 2012 by

We had a wonderful Linaro UEFI mini-sprint at Cambridge from 11-13 Dec and fixed a lot of lingering problems like a home for all the board support for edk2(UEFI) on ARM. Ryan has set up a common tree for all the boards git://git.linaro.org/arm/uefi/uefi-next.git This is going to be the de-facto upstream for UEFI on ARM. Grant, Oliver with Ryan reflected on the maintainership structure for UEFI on ARM. Leif worked hard to natively build the UEFI on ARM to get rid of x86 from his life, which he has almost done using his hacked chromebook running Debian—a loyal ARM and Linaro employee!

I worked to build it for the latest tool chain as I always end up using old tool chains resulting code breaking in latest tool chains. There was a lot of planning and discussions related to UEFI on ARM led by Andrea.

The UEFI boot loader LEG has ported to Arnadle is capable for microSD boot now. We are working to add SATA and network boot support on it now. The binary and setup for the Arndale is available here https://wiki.linaro.org/Boards/Arndale/Setup/UEFI.

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Linaro, CTO’s End of Year Report (2012)

Posted on December 17, 2012 by

When I was a young lad at school, I loved the Christmas holiday.  You could bring your toys into school and play games on the last afternoon.  In those pre-electronic days, it was likely to be strategy board games such as Monopoly or card games featuring superheroes.  Looking back at 2012, I realize that things are not so different now.

I’m lucky enough to work with superheroes every day.   Just look at the engineering that Linaro has been involved with.  big.LITTLE, kernel consolidation, UMM, ARMv8 and the list goes on.  It’s 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”.  What’s 2013 going to be all about?  Just wait and see.  It’s a real privilege to be a part of this and to have made so many friends doing it.

In my school days, I’d get a school report at the end of each term.  Mine were a bit variable; from the sublime to the ridiculous, including the marvelous statement that “when David joins us on Planet Earth he does some very good work indeed”.  If I were to give Linaro marks, I’d give high marks for effort and achievements, with new members and the formation of the Linaro Enterprise Group, LEG.  A measure of Linaro’s success can be found in perhaps the most outstanding compliment I have heard.   This came from Linus Torvalds when asked what things still get him excited, the said “What makes me happy is when some painful process issue gets resolved. For me, over the last year, it’s been ARM who from a constant headache in every single merge window has become an upstanding citizen in the Linux community” (see here, for the article).

I don’t play strategy board games much any more, I play strategy for real.  That strategy has partially been about picking the right technical problems to focus on.   That is, those that the members want us to work on and where we are uniquely qualified to make a difference.  I don’t particularly think that Linaro is the best place to tune Codecs, but it is certainly the best place to establish a kernel sub-architecture maintainer’s group or help launch a new 64 bit architecture.

Finally, what toys can I bring in and play with?  I bought a Nexus 7, this shows that Android has come of age and is a very worthy player in the tablet space.   This is a good piece of engineering in a lovely form factor.  I use mine all the time, despite having an iPad.   My recent new toy, is a Samsung Chromebook.  I even managed to contribute some code fixes to Fedora.

So, a very happy new year to one and all.   Take time out, relax, hug your loved ones and get ready for an exciting 2013.

Posted in Industry, Linaro | Leave a comment

Linaro Wants You – QA Support Engineer- Seoul Korea

Posted on December 14, 2012 by

Today we are highlighting career opportunities at Linaro in Seoul, Korea. Are you or someone you know located in or near Seoul, Korea  and want to be part of the future of Linux on ARM?

Yes, then keep reading!

What are we looking for?

LAVA/QA/Support Engineer

Linaro is looking for an experienced support engineer to help automated deployment, validation and result analysis for Android and Ubuntu based on our member’s ARM development boards. You will be a part of Member Services team and provide LAVA ( Linaro automated validation Architecture – http://lava.readthedocs.org/en/latest/) solution to our members, reporting on test status, bug tracking as well as help to setup in-house validation solution, resolve technical issue or question of Linaro’s members, partners and prospects.

More information on this role can be found at: http://www.linaro.org/careers/linaro/lavaqasupport-engineer

How to apply

Want to apply for this role? Then email your information to careers@linaro.org

Other career opportunities at Linaro

All available career opportunities can be found at: http://www.linaro.org/careers/linaro/

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About Linaro

Linaro is the place where engineers from the world’s leading technology companies define the future of Linux on ARM. The company is a not-for-profit engineering organization with over 120 engineers working on consolidating and optimizing open source software for the ARM architecture, including developer tools, the Linux kernel, ARM power management, and other software infrastructure.

To find out more, please visit http://www.linaro.org.

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