Linux Category - Page 249 of 574 - CNX Software

December 9, 2018December 8, 2018 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 11 Comments

Buildroot For NanoPi NEO4 RK3399 SBC

NanoPi NEO4 is the smallest and cheapest RK3399 board so far, featuring the hexa-core processor into a $45 60×45 mm single board computer. FriendlyELEC usually provides decent documentation and software support for their boards, but Flatmax was not satisfied with the build system provided by Rockchip / FriendlyELEC. So he took the matter into his own hands, worked on and released a buildroot external tree for building NanoPi NEO4 SD card images. Flatmax mentioned this is the first completely contained build system for the NanoPi NEO4. The build process is explained on Github, and basically goes like this: Clone buildroot

git clone git://git.busybox.net/buildroot buildroot.neo4

1	git clone git://git.busybox.net/buildroot buildroot.neo4

Install dependencies

sudo apt-get install -y build-essential gcc g++ autoconf automake libtool bison flex gettext
sudo apt-get install -y patch texinfo wget git gawk curl lzma bc quilt

1 2	sudo apt-get install -y build-essential gcc g++ autoconf automake libtool bison flex gettext sudo apt-get install -y patch texinfo wget git gawk curl lzma bc quilt

Clone NEO4 buildroot external tree

git clone git@github.com:flatmax/NanoPi.Neo4.buildroot.external.git NanoPi.Neo4

1	git clone git@github.com:flatmax/NanoPi.Neo4.buildroot.external.git NanoPi.Neo4

Build the system

. NanoPi.Neo4/setup.sh yourPath/buildroot.neo4
mkdir yourPath/buildroot.dl
make

. NanoPi.Neo4/setup.sh yourPath/buildroot.neo4

mkdir yourPath/buildroot.dl

make

Flash it to the micro SD card

sudo ./output/images/sd-fuse-rk3399/fusing.sh /dev/sdX buildroot

1	sudo ./output/images/sd-fuse-rk3399/fusing.sh /dev/sdX buildroot

Just replace /dev/sdX with your actual SD card device. Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software […]

December 6, 2018December 6, 2018 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

PHYTEC phyCORE-AM65x SoM Features TI Sitara AM654x Processor

We already knew Texas Instruments was working on AM654 processor, the first 64-bit Arm SoC from the company, featuring four Cortex A53 cores, a PowerVR SGX544 GPU, dual lock-step capable Cortex R5F cores, and interfaces targeting industrial applications. Now at least one company has announced a system-on-module based on the solution. PHYTEC phyCORE-AM65x is equipped with AM654x processor, DDR4 and ECC DDR4 memory, up to 32GB eMMC flash, as well as built-in Ethernet, WiFi, and Bluetooth connectivity. phyCORE-AM65x specifications: SoC – Texas Instruments Sitara AM65x with 4x Arm Cortex-A53 cores, dual-core Arm Cortex-R5F MCU subsystem, PowerVR SGX544 GPU, 6x PRU-ICSSG System Memory – DDR4 with support for discrete DDR4 ECC Storage – Up to 32GB eMMC Connectivity Optional 2.4 or 5GHz Certified WiFi Solution 10/100/1000 Mbit/s Ethernet PHY on SOM Board-to-board connectors – 2x “high-density PCB interconnects” Dimensions – 65 x 55 mm The company provides Linux (Yocto Project), Android, […]

December 5, 2018 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 6 Comments

MicroSemi Introduces PolarFire FPGA & RISC-V SoC

In the past we’ve covered SoCs comprised of Arm cores and FPGA fabric via Xilinx Zynq-7000 series SoCs and Zynq UltraScale+ series MPSoCs, respectively featuring up to two Arm Cortex A9 cores, and up to four Cortex A53 cores. MicroSemi has now announced an alternative, not based on Arm cores, but instead based on SiFive U54-MC RISC-V cores combined with PolarFire FPGA fabric. PolarFire FPGA RISC-V SoC key features & specifications: FPGA – Microsemi PolarFire FPGA Processor Cores – Up to 4x SiFive U54-MC RISC-V cores clocked at up to 1.5GHz (performance similar to Cortex-A35 cores); 28nm process Deterministic Coherent Multi-core CPU Cluster Deterministic L2 Memory Subsystem System Memory I/F – Integrated DDR4/LPDDR4 Controller and PHY Storage – Secure Boot, 128K Boot Flash Debug capability Rich I/Os Low Power – Low static power; power optimized transceivers, up to 50% lower power compared to SRAM based FPGAs So we don’t have […]

December 4, 2018 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 8 Comments

Orange Pi 3G-IoT Board Finally Gets a Linux Image

Shenzhen Xunlong has launched several cellular IoT boards over the last few years with Orange Pi 2G-IoT, Orange Pi 3G-IoT and Orange Pi 4G-IoT, but each time, they are launched with Android support only. Linux support on the 2G board has never been great, while the Android 8.1 SDK for Orange Pi 4G-IoT was released earlier this year, but no Linux image are available. This leaves us with Orange Pi 3G-IoT board that just got its first Linux based firmware images released today on both Baidu and Google Drive cloud storage storage services. Four images are available for Orange Pi 3G-IoT-A (256MB DDR2) and Orange Pi 3G-IoT-B (512MB DDR2) boards with images booting from eMMC flash or micro SD card. A shell script (tar_image.sh) is provided to flash the image to the micro SD card since the latter for follow a specific partition layout. Sadly, there’s no mention of the […]

November 30, 2018 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 24 Comments

QNAP HS-453DX Fanless NAS Features Gemini Lake Processor, 10GbE, HDMI 2.0

Intel Gemini Lake processors are usually found in consumer products such as motherboards, mini PCs, tablets, and laptops, but QNAP has just announced a fanless NAS – QNAP HS-453DX – targeting home users, and equipped with an Intel Celeron J4105 Gemini Lake processor, the same chip as found in the recently launched ODROID-H2 SBC. The NAS comes with 4 to 8GB RAM, supports two 3.5″ hard drives, two M.2 SSD, and includes interfaces like HDMI 2.0 outputs and 10Gb Ethernet, making it not only suitable as a high-speed NAS, but also as a 4K media player. Two versions of the NAS are available: QNAP HS-453DX-4G and HS-453DX-8GB only differing by the amount of RAM. Specifications: SoC – Intel Celeron J4105 quad-core processor @ 1.5 GHz / 2.5 GHz with Intel UHD Graphics 600 System Memory – 4 or 8GB via 2x SO-DIMM DDR4 sockets Storage 4GB eMMC flash for firmware […]

November 30, 2018 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments

Necuno Mobile Open Source Linux Smartphone is Powered by NXP i.MX 6 Processor

A few years ago, various companies tried to develop other Linux based mobile operating systems, but most failed with Mozilla Firefox OS discontinued, Samsung Tizen is not being used in smartphones anymore, and Sailfish OS giving up the consumer market focusing on governmental and corporate customers instead. There’s still a niche market however for privacy-focused, open source Linux smartphones, and we’ve already covered NXP i.MX 8M based Purism Librem 5 smartphone scheduled to launch next year with GNOME based PureOS operating system, and the ability to switch to PureOS with KDE Plasma Mobile or Ubuntu Touch. Necuno Mobile will be another Linux smartphone based on an NXP processor, but instead of relying on a 64-bit i.MX 8M processor, it will be equipped with the older 32-bit i.MX 6Quad processor, and according to the company be “100% open source device, from metal to pixel, from hardware to software”. Necuno Mobile preliminary […]

November 29, 2018November 29, 2018 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 74 Comments

Amazon EC2 A1 Arm Instances Deliver up to 45% Cost Savings over x86 Instances

Just a couple of days ago, Amazon introduced EC2 A1 Arm instances based on custom-designed AWS Graviton processors featuring up to 32 Arm Neoverse cores. Commenters started a discussion about price and the real usefulness of Arm cores compared to x86 cores since the latter are likely to be better optimized, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) pricing for EC2 A1 instances did not seem that attractive to some. The question whether it makes sense will obviously depend on the workload, and metrics like performance per dollar, and performance per watt. AWS re:Invent 2018 is taking place now, and we are starting to get some answers with Amazon claiming up to 45% reduction in costs. It sounds good, except there’s not much information about the type of workload here. So it would be good if there was an example of company leveraging this type of savings with their actual products or […]

November 28, 2018November 28, 2018 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 15 Comments

Sony PlayStation Classic Teardown Reveals MediaTek MT8167A Processor

Miniature versions of popular game consoles from earlier decades have been all the rage recently, but they all have one thing in common: the inability to add games by default. But eventually, people find ways. For example, when it was found Nintendo NES Classic Mini was found to be powered by an Allwinner R16 processor, enthusiasts found ways to run RetroArch on the device with some efforts. One of the latest announcement was Sony PlayStation Classic, and as reviewers got hold of early sample of the miniature gaming console, it got torn down by HDBlog Italia. That means we now have a good idea of the technical specifications of the console: SoC – MediaTek MT8167A quad core Arm Cortex-A35 processor @ 1.5 GHz with PowerVR GE8300 GPU System Memory – 1GB DDR3-1866 (Samsung K4B4G1646E-BYMA) Storage – 16GB eMMC 5.1 flash (Samsung KLMAG1JETD-B041) Video Output – HDMI port up to 720p […]