F2FS – A New Flash File System for Mobile Devices – ELCE 2012

Joo-Young Hwang, principal engineer at Samsung, presents F2FS (Flash-Friendly File System), a new file system designed for storage in mobile devices at the Embedded Linux Conference in Barcelona, Spain, on November 5, 2012. Abstract: Recent mobile devices adopt various flash storages as a primary storage. File system support for those flash storages is a must for flash device performance and lifespan. I will present a new file system, called F2FS, designed for mobile flash storages. F2FS is designed considering the characteristics of the underlying flash storage which has flash translation layer (FTL). F2FS outperforms EXT4, which is a popular file system for Android phones, in most of benchmarks. I will describe motivation, design, and implementation of the file system, then show performance comparison data with EXT4. Target audiences are those who are interested in file system support for flash storages such as eMMC and SSD. Kernel and file system expertise […]

Embedded Linux Boot Time Optimizations – ELCE 2012

Alexandre Belloni, embedded Linux engineer and trainer at Adeneo Embedded, gives a presentation about different techniques to optimize boot time for Embedded Linux at ELCE 2012. He also explains how they’ve measured the boot time. Abstract: A common problem faced when embedding Linux is the long boot time before the system is functional. There are many ways to improve boot up time. For a particular project, we had to answer a CAN message from Linux userspace in less than 420 ms from going out of CPU reset. We will describe our methodology and the techniques we finally chose to implement in that particular use case. We will also detail how we measured the boot time efficiently. A live demo will show the results of our work. More specifically, Alexandre discusses two projects at Adeneo where boot time was critical: An automotive platform based on Freescale i.mx53 needs to reply to […]

Piglit OpenGL Driver Testing Framework Now Works with ARM Linux & OpenGL ES

Piglit is a collection of automated tests for OpenGL implementations that aims at improving the quality of open source OpenGL drivers by providing developers with a simple means to perform regression tests. ARM SoCs that come with a GPU usually (always?) supports OpenGL ES however. That’s why, Tom Gall (Linaro) has modified Piglit in order to bring this test suite to ARM Linux and OpenGL ES. There are about 6,900 OpenGL tests in Piglit, and currently 1,047 Piglit (OpenGL ES) tests can run on ARM . Tom also explains that piglit developers are now using waffle, a cross-platform C library that allows one to defer selection of GL API and window system until runtime. This will allow your to select the variation of the GL API (GL, GL ES) and windowing system (X11, Wayland…) you want to use at runtime. The code is still heavily modified, but it’s in the […]

ZOPO ZP900S Leader Smartphone Unboxing and Review

I’ve just received ZOPO ZP900S smartphone from Pandawill by Fedex. This phablet features a 5.3″ display, MediaTek MTK6577 dual core cortex A9 processor with 512 MB RAM, 4GB flash and runs Android 4.0 (upgradable to Android 4.1 once the firmware is released). This is the lite version of ZOPO ZP900 which comes with 1GB RAM. Both devices look like low cost versions of the Samsung Galaxy Note as you can see from the comparison table below between ZOPO ZP900S, ZOPO ZP900 and Samsung Galaxy Note N7000. ZOPO ZP900S & ZP900 Specifications ZOPO ZP900S Leader ZOPO ZP900 Leader Samsung Galaxy Note CPU Mediatek MTK6577 @ 1GHz Samsung Exynos 4210 @ 1.4 GHz GPU POWERVR SGX531T ARM Mali-400MP RAM 512 MB 1GB 1GB Storage 4 GB Flash + microSD 16GB/32GB Flash + microSD Display 5.3″ IPS 960×540 (qHD) 5.3″ super AMOLED 1280×800 Camera 8MP Rear, 2MP Front 8MP Rear, 2MP Front Wi-Fi […]

SoC Power Measurement with ARM Energy Probes and Linux EAP Tools

Andy Green, TI Landing Team lead at Linaro,  gave an interesting presentation entitled “How to measure SoC power” at Linaro Connect Europe 2012. This talk was specifically aimed at software engineers, so that they know how to properly measure power consumption, and take actions to optimize the software to decrease it. In the first part of the presentation, he gives an overview of electronics basics with definition of voltage, load, current and power, units used for power measurements (Clue: you need to use Watts), and how voltage, current and power can be measured with voltmeters and ammeters. When you want to measure power in a rail, you would usually insert a shun resistor, use a multimeter and derive the power from the resistance and the measured voltage (P=V2/R). He also gives details about regulator efficiency, choosing measurement sampling… There are 4 common measurements strategies: DC IN – Easiest way, gives the complete […]

Getting Started with 64-bit ARM Development: Hello World and Linux on ARMv8 Fast Models

At the end of last year, ARM announced ARMv8, the first ARM 64-bit ARM archtecture, and last week at ARM Techcon 2012, ARM announced the first ARMv8 cores: Cortex A53 and A57. But since there’s no silicon at the moment, what if you wanted to develop code running on ARMv8 before the hardware is available? The answer is: Fast Models, a Virtual Platform (VP) to accelerate software development. This is especially important for ARMv8 since hardware is not expected to be available for another year. In this post, I’ll first show how to run “Hello World!” in ARMv8 fast models, then we’ll run ARM Linux 64-Bit (Aarch64) in the virtual platform. ARMv8 Foundation Model In order allow the developer’s community to program for ARMv8 (Cortex A53/A57 cores), ARM has made ARMv8 Foundation Model, a virtual platform, available free of charge. This v8 Foundation model provides a basic ARMv8 platform environment […]

Rockchip RK3066/RK30xx Processors Documentation, Source Code and Tools

Rockchip RK3066 (part of RK30xx family) is a Chinese dual ARM Cortex A9 SoC targeting multimedia products such as tablets (e.g. Cube U30GT), mini PC (e.g UG802, MK808) and in theory set-top boxes, but I can’t find any products based on this Rockchip processor. It seems mini PCs/ HDMI TV sticks have taken over this market. RK3066 Processor The processor features two ARM Cortex A9 clocked at up to 1.6 Ghz with a quad core Mali-400MP GPU. It can support 1080p (3D) encoding/decoding, provides HDMI 1.4a, VGA, composite, component and LVDS video outputs (Dual display support),  USB 2.0 Host and OTG ports, a MAC interface (Ethernet), and much more… Here are the key features of Rockchip RK3066 processor: Dual Core A9 + Quad Core Mali-400MP GPU 2 banks, 8/16 bit Nor flash / SRAM interface 8 banks, 8/16 bit async NAND flash, LBA NAND flash and 8-bit sync ONFI NAND […]

Linaro 12.10 Release with Linux kernel 3.6 and Android 4.1.2

Linaro release 12.10 has recently been announced, and includes Linux Kernel 3.6.1 and Android 4.1.2. This release provides further improvement to big.LITTLE architecture and Linux can boot on TC2 (A Test Chip with 2 Cortex A15 and 3 Cortex a7 cores) and an ARMv8 (Aarch64) OpenEmbedded community build is now available for download.  Work has also be done on preparing demos for Linaro Connect (29 Oct – 02 Nov) in Copenhagen including a single ARM kernel booting on different boards. Here are the highlights of the release: Android Linaro Android 12.10 has been upgraded to 4.1.1_r6 and then to 4.1.2. Linaro Android builds are now shipped with improved instructions. AOSP Galaxy Nexus builds are available from http://android-build.linaro.org and include DS-5 support. Linaro Android toolchain has been updated to Linaro GCC 2012.10. Dalvik benchmarked against Hard-Float Open JDK and Java SE. Power meter improvements for LAVA automation. Prepared Connect demonstrations benchmarking […]

UP 7000 x86 SBC