Linaro 12.01 Release with Kernel 3.2 – Android 4.0.3

• Android
  • Linaro’s ICS has been upgraded to 4.0.3.
  • Linaro Android ICS builds are now optimized using -O3 with the Linaro Toolchain.
  • Click through builds now work with LAVA.
  • Many parts of Linaro Android 4.x can be built without the -fno-strict-aliasing compiler flag.
  • The monthly toolchain benchmark in LAVA has been updated.
• Developer Platform
  • Basic Graphics, WIFI and Bluetooth enablement tests are now available for LAVA
  • Landing Team packaged LEB kernels for Freescale, Samsung and Snowball are now generated in a CI loop, available at http://ci.linaro.org
  • U-Boot-Linaro now supports Snowball, and it’s based on the 2011.12 u-boot release.
  • Linaro now offers a new community supported reference image that provides set top box like capability. The image is called linaro-tv and provides the award-winning XBMC media player and entertainment hub for digital media enabled by default.
  • PandaBoard LT HWPack now supports hardware accelerated video decoding, supporting Gstreamer and enabling both XBMC and Ubuntu TV to be fully accelerated.
  • An official sysroot, based on Ubuntu LEB, is now available for people to use with the cross toolchain.
  • Cross-buildd running automatic cross-builds of uploads to Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise) and Debian Sid (unstable) using sbuild.
• Infrastructure
  • http://status.linaro.org has been redesigned to give a clearer impression of the Linaro roadmap, milestone and quarterly progress.
  • EULA acceptance has been added to our continuous integration scripts.
  • status.linaro.org lane views show a high level progress indicator for a quarter with blueprints delivered vs. planned
  • Seeded builds set up to work in production mode now.
• Graphics
  • glmark2: work completed during 12.01 aimed to support running each benchmark in a fresh GL context (use –reuse-context to rever to the old behaviour of using the same context for all benchmarks), and adding an option to show a live fps counter on the screen (–show-fps). For Android the crash on platforms not supporting glMapBufferOES was fixed, and some minor updates were implemented to allow logging of the glmark2 score when finishing, or logging an error message if it fails to find a suitable EGLContext. Android glmark2 also received various stability improvements.
  • unity/nux/compiz: No new features were added and focus remained on ensuring that the current code works with upstream and desktop. Ricardo Salveti maintains a log of the actions and constraints in https://wiki.linaro.org/WorkingGroups/Middleware/Graphics/Unity3Dfrom which the following excerpt comes:
    • For Nux: GLES 2 branch is already merged upstream and lp:nux should be the reference when building and testing for GLES
    • For Unity3d: Branch lp:~linaro-graphics-wg/unity/linaro-gles2 should be used until it’s merged upstream, seems it’s not yet merged because it depends on the Compiz version from Linaro. There are several issues which Alexandros Frantzis has outlined (black border around windows – should be fixed soon by a patch from Frederic Plourdes, orange rectangles that are drawn from the grid plugin when one tries to place a window to the left half or to the right half or to fullscreen is completely opaque instead of translucent and finally, the expo plugin, neither the background of each virtual desktop, nor the glow is drawn (all is black)).
    • For Compiz: this still needs to be merged upstream, current tree is tracked by branch lp:~linaro-graphics-wg/compiz-core/linaro-gles2 for compiz core, lp:~linaro-graphics-wg/compiz-plugins-main/linaro-gles2 for plugins. libcompizconfig needs a rebuild after new compiz is installed (because of the ABI bump at Compiz).
    • For UMM: dma-buf – the buffer sharing mechanism for Linux kernel drivers – has been incorporated into Linus Torvalds’ tree.
• Kernel
  • Forward progress on upstreaming of Android codebase. Greg KH has pulled the core functionality into drivers/staging; John Stultz and Anton Vornostov are actively working on changes to fully integrate ashmem and lowmem killer into the main codebase.
  • eMMC4.5 Data Tag feature pushed upstream by Saugata Das
  • Linus Walleij’ pinmux code merged upstream and several iterations of pin state and pinconfig patches reviewed. DT bindings for pin mux descriptions moving forward with input from Dong Aisheng and Shawn Guo.
  • Large number of driver updates for Samsung drivers from Thomas Abraham for adding DT support.
  • Kernel release transitioned from Nicolas Pitre to Andrey Konovalov.
• Multimedia
  • In addition to the release, the multimedia team worked to get audio to “just work” for PandaBoard dealing with bugs such as https://bugs.launchpad.net/linaro-ubuntu/+bug/893402 (The multimedia teams notes that even though the audio to was shown to work, there are still some bus exceptions to work out.)
  • The team reports good progress on end to end prototype for testing audio on PandaBoard, and optimising XBMC on the Ubuntu LEB.
  • Bugs fixes include:
    • fixing issues with skia-bench for libjpeg-turbo (https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/912035)
    • fixing missing development header file for libjpeg-turbo (https://bugs.launchpad.net/libjpeg-turbo/+bug/898395)
• Power Management
  • Schemd_mc
    • Continued testing and /improving sched_mc, will consolidate the results after integration of an smp cpuidle driver on PandaBoard is done by TILT and OMAP upstream.
    • Continued discussion with Paul McKenney about the scheduler, how to improve the scheduler for Power savings. A mini-summit is scheduled at next Connect for this purpose.
  • Common cpuidle
    • Continued working on moving cpuidle code from arch/arm to the drivers/cpuidle directory. Russell King, Arnd Bergmann and Daniel Lezcano seem in agreement on how to do it. Daniel Lezcano provided new assembly routine and Worked on the standby function for at91 factoring out the code.
    • Continued cleaning up Arm cpuidle and make a generic common cpuidle driver framework, so all platforms can use it.
  • Common Clock
    • Working on V5 of Common Clk framework, there has been continued discussion on the list which has been affecting recent design decisions.
    • Continued porting omap clocks over to the new common clk framework.
  • Thermal Driver
    • Integrated Samsung Thermal Driver with Linaro-kernel
    • Submitted 3 versions of Thermal driver patch for i.MX6 Freescale, working on v4
    • Submitted a patch that uses the temperature information in thermal layer to generate some useful information like temperature drop per cooling state.
  • hrtimer
    • Submitted a patch to implement core high-res timers feature to return time spent in usleep_range()
• Toolchain
  • Mainly bug fix releases.
  • Pre-built binaries for Linaro GCC and Linaro GDB.
• Validation
  • Automatic validation is now running a recording on the results that GLMark2 runs on Linaro Android builds.
  • LAVA Android Test runs Android Compatibility Test Suite (CTS) on Linaro Android.
  • LAVA Test documentation now contains a list of supported tests.
  • LAVA now runs Android testing on Snowball boards.
  • LAVA test jobs can now specify the filesystem to use for the rootfs.

Here are the known issues for this release (mainly related to Android 4.0):

• ADB over USB doesn’t work on i.MX53 (Android)
• Android support to webcams (UVC based)
• No HW Gfx on Upstream Panda Build (Android)
• Audio doesn’t work on snowball (Android)
• Suspend does not work on Samsung Origen (Android)
• HW graphics acceleration does not work on iMX53 (Android)
• Origen : Tethering over Bluetooth/WiFi/USB missing in ICS
• Hardware accelerated Audio support missing on Snowball (Android)
• DVI out port is not working with staging-panda or tracking-panda (Android)
• vexpress-a9: USB mass storage doesn’t work in Android
• [regression] no audio on quickstart with 11.11 (Ubuntu / i.MX53)
• [regression] sound not working on panda with lt-omap at 11.11 (Ubuntu)
• [regression] No DVI output on the PandaBoard with kernel 3.1.0-1402-linaro-lt-omap (Ubuntu)
• SGX driver failing on ICS on tracking-panda
• BT doesn’t work on ICS on Panda
• GLMark2 not available on ICS
• Black screen shows up after launched Angry Bird (Origen)
• Resume fails on mainline panda and tracking panda builds (Android)
• vexpress-a9: ICS: Suspend-Resume doesn’t work (Android)
• 0xbenchmark stopped when select “Native” test suite to run (Android)
• Gallery app does not show thumbnail on pandaboard
• Snowball: Menu in lower right corner does not work on landing snowball (Android)
• [regression] Origen: HDMI doesn’t work with 3.2 kernel (Ubuntu)
• vexpress-a9: Video playback fails in Gallery app
• glmark2 crashed on tracking-panda
• landing-panda and aosp-panda don’t boot with linaro-uboot
• Snowball: 0xbench native test fails to run to completion
• 0xbenchmark crashes on vexpress-a9
• Email App on fails to work on Pandaboard
• The default Ethernet Device name on iMX53 should be eth0 (Android)
• Resume fails on Snowball (Android)
• USB SD card export not working on Android
• No gatord on Origen (Android)
• [regression] playbin can’t play video using sw decode after enabling TI specific patches (Ubuntu / Pandaboard)

Go to https://wiki.linaro.org/Cycles/1201/Release for further release details about the LEB, Android, Kernel, Graphics, Landing Team,  Platform, Power management and Toolchain (GCC / Qemu) components.