11 Recommendations for Optimizing Mobile Apps Power Efficiency

Following an AT&T Labs Research and corresponding paper entitled “Profiling Resource Usage for Mobile Applications: A Cross-layer Approach“,  AT&T found that a few simple design approaches could significantly improve mobile application responsiveness and reduce battery drain by lowering your application power consumption. They analyzed PANDORA internet radio and  discovered that the streaming music was delivered efficiently, but periodic audience measurements were draining battery life. Here is an excerpt of the PANDORA Case Study: While the music itself was sent simply and efficiently as a single file, the periodic audience measurements—each constituting only 2KBs or so—were being transmitted at regular 62.5-second intervals. The constant cycle of ramping up to full power (2 seconds to ramp up, 1 second to download 2KB) and back to idle (17 seconds for the two tail times, the first down from full-power mode and the second down from half-power mode) was extremely wasteful. Of the total […]

The Yocto Project Eclipse Plug-In – ELCE 2011

Jessica Zhang is Software Engineer at Intel and works on Yocto Application Development Kit (ADT) and its Eclipse plug-in. She presented Yocto Project Eclipse Plug-in at Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2011. Abstract: Yocto project is an open source collaboration project that aims at helping embedded Linux software developers, either for system or application development. The Yocto Eclipse plug-in provides an effective integrated development environment that is based on the widely adopted Eclipse CDT and TCF extensions. It allows user to seamlessly interact with various Yocto project development tools. Yocto 1.0 targeted application developers via cross toolchains and sysroot setup, with remote deploy, debug and analysis. For 1.1, we have added support in the Yocto Eclipse plug-ins for system development through interaction with the bitbake UI interface for a Yocto bitbake commander type project. This talk will demo the end-to-end usage flows of Yocto Eclipse plug-in for both system and application […]

Linaro Android Tutorial with the Pandaboard

Zach Pfeffer, the tech lead of the Linaro Android working group, gave a tutorial about Linaro Android at Linaro Connect Q4.11. During this tutorial, attendees were shown how to download a recent build for the pandaboard, how to make a bootable SD card image using the linaro-android-media-create command and how to boot the board with it. The full setup was composed of a Pandaboard connected to a HDMI monitor with a keyboard and mouse connected to the board as well as serial to USB cable to connect to the development machine. He also used an SD card reader to generate the bootable Android image. The images are available at Android Linaro Build Service. There are quite a few build named after the supported board (e..g panda for pandaboard, snowball for ST Ericsson Snowball etc..) and the kernel version (tracking = latest linaro kernel, staging = stable linaro  kernel). Then an […]

Linux Kernel Debugging – Linaro Connect Q4 2011

Linaro Connect Q4.2011 takes place on the 31 October – 4 November 2011 in Orlando. In the video below, Linaro toolchain developers asked kernel developers about their potential needs for kernel debugging. Several options to improve the kernel debugging experience were discussed. In particular, the toolchain group will make sure that OpenOCD works at least on one of the member boards to allow for easy debugging through JTAG. They also mentioned support for o-profile. This session was an opportunity to review debugging techniques used by kernel developers. It also allowed most participants to discover the GDB Text User Interface (GDB TUI), a very convenient way to interact with GDB, without having to go through heavyweight environments like Eclipse. You can follow this subject on Blueprints for Toolchain support for Kernel Debugging on Linaro website. The audio is quite poor, so use some headphones or boost the volume to hear anything. […]

Run 2 OS Simultaneously on ARM (OMAP4) with Codezero Embedded Hypervisor

B Labs, a company specializing in ARM Virtualization, was at ARM Techcon 2011 showcasing Codezero, their Embedded Hypervisor to run multiple Linux OS such as Android and Chrome OS on ARM processors. The main purpose of running 2 operating systems is to separate home and enterprise operating systems in mobile devices so that enterprise data is safe. Charbax (ARMDevices.net) interviewed Bahadir Baldan, founder of B Labs, and showed a demo running 2 Android instances and another running Android and Linux in pandaboard. The overhead is 10 to 15% according to B Labs, so the performance hit is minimal. They have already managed to run 4 OS on quad core processors with good performance. They are not able to run Windows operating systems (e.g. Windows Mobile 7.5/ Windows 8) yet, because Cortex A9 processors lack virtualization extensions. This will however be feasible with Cortex A15 processors as binary virtualization will be available. […]

Qualcomm Fast Computer Vision SDK

Qualcomm introduced FastCV (Fast Computer Vision), a mobile-optimized computer vision (CV) library that includes the most frequently used vision processing functions for use across a wide array of Android mobile devices. FastCV provides computationally intensive vision processing APIs, with hardware acceleration and better performance on mobile devices. FastCV is designed for efficiency on all ARM-based processors, but is also especially tuned to take advantage of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processors (Qualcomm S2 and above).  That’s because FastCV for Snapdragon can offload processing onto various subsystems within the processor, whereas FastCV for ARM is limited to acceleration on the CPU. FastCV is the framework at the heart of Qualcomm’s vision-based Augmented Reality (AR) SDK, because AR is much more precise and useful when it’s based on camera input than on location-based estimates. Qualcomm anticipates that FastCV will be used to build additional frameworks that will allow developers of computer vision apps to build […]

Mentor Embedded Inflexion UI Demo for STB/IPTV

Mentor Embedded developed a user interface for STB/IPTV demo using their Inflexion UI framework and they showcase it at ARM Techcon 2011. The demo runs on Android and looks very smooth thanks to OpenGL ES hardware acceleration. They also have a separate demo with pandaboard and a laptop running Sourcery codebench development tool to show how to develop a simple user interface with Inflexion UI. Finally, they showcase “Stella“, a self-balancing robot with 2 wheels. The board is based on TI Stellartis (Cortex M3) micro-controller and runs Mentor Embedded Nucleus RTOS. Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011. www.cnx-software.com

Yocto Project Release 1.1 Announced

The Linux foundation announced Yocto Project Release 1.1 today. This release codenamed “Edison” and based on Poky 6.0 is the the second release of the project, one year after it was announced in October 2010 to provide developers with greater consistency in the software and tools they’re using across multiple architectures for embedded Linux development. The Yocto Project reached the following milestones during the last year: Alignment of OpenEmbedded technology and the inclusion of OpenEmbedded representation in the Yocto Project governance structure. The projects share a common core that consists of software build recipes and core Linux components that prevent fragmentation and reinforce the OpenEmbedded methodology as an open standard for embedded Linux build systems. Contribution of tools and technologies such as Cross-prelink, EGLIBC, Pseudo, Shoeleather Lab (for automated testing) and Swabber have been contributed from Intel, Mentor Graphics, MontaVista Software and Wind River. Commercial adoption with examples such as […]

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