kernel News - Page 8 of 25 - CNX Software

September 18, 2014September 18, 2014 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 8 Comments

Mediatek Releases Linux Source Code for Android One Smartphones

Android One is a program by Google aiming at bringing low cost smartphones to the emerging markets with firmware updates to the latest Android version guaranteed for two years. Three phones part of Android One program have recently been announced for the Indian market: Micromax Canvas A1, Karbonn Sparkle V, and Spice Dream Uno, and Android One phones will be available in Indonesia, the Philippines and South Asia (Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka) by the year of the year. The three phones currently available sell for $100, which based on the specs (quad core processor, 1GB RAM, 4GB flash, 4.5″ display) is not exactly an aggressive pricing compared to what is already available from Aliexpress, but the main advantage here is clearly Google support with promised firmware updates, and currently Android 4.4.4. All these phones appear to be powered by Mediatek MT6582, and company decided to release the Linux […]

August 24, 2014June 22, 2016 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 24 Comments

Linux (Enlightenment and Lubuntu) in WeTek Play Amlogic TV Box

Last week I reviewed WeTek Play, a TV box with two DVB-S2 tuners, powered by Amlogic AML8726-MX dual core ARM Cortex A9 processor, and running Android 4.2, but the company also released several Linux based images including one with Enlightenment window manager, and another, temporary one, with Ubuntu core which allows you to install Lubuntu or Xubuntu with apt-get. There are also working on OpenELEC, but have not released the binary yet. Today, I’ll try the Enlightenment image because it also supports hardware video decoding via Gplay (gstreamer), and show how to install Lubuntu. The instructions below have been done in a computer running Ubuntu 14.04, but a Windows computer can also be used. Download Wetek-Linux.img.bz2 Connect a micro SD card to your computer, extract and flash Wetek-Linux.img: In Linux using a terminal window:

bzip2 -d Wetek-LInux.img.bz2
sudo dd if=Wetek-Linux.img of=/dev/sdd bs=1M
sync

bzip2 -d Wetek-LInux.img.bz2

sudo dd if=Wetek-Linux.img of=/dev/sdd bs=1M

sync

In Windows, extract the image, and use Win32DiskImager to copy the image to your micro SD […]

August 21, 2014May 29, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2014 Schedule – IoT, ARM vs x86, Optimization, Power Management, Debugging…

The Embedded Linux Conference Europe (ELC 2014), CloudOpen, and LinuxCon Europe will jointly take place at the Congress Centre Düsseldorf, in Germany on October 13 – 15, 2014. The 3-day events will consists of keynotes, presentations, and tutorials. Each day will open with two or three keynotes by speakers including Jim Zemlin (Executive Director, Linux Foundation), and Jono Bacon (XPRIZE), followed by presentation and tutorials. There will be 45 presentations for ELCE, 58 for LinuxCon, and 47 for CloudOpen, I’ll make a virtual schedule with a few sessions part of the Embedded Linux Conference Europe “track”. Monday, October 13 11:15 – 12:05 – Performance Analysis Using the Perf Suite by Mans Rullgar, Consultant When faced with a performance problem, the initial steps towards a solution include identifying the sections of code responsible and the precise reasons they are time-consuming. To this end, the ‘perf’ profiling tools provide valuable insight into the […]

August 6, 2014May 29, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 4 Comments

Linux 3.16 Released

Linus Torvalds announced the release of Linux Kernel 3.16 over the week-end: So nothing particularly exciting happened this week, and 3.16 is out there. And as usual (previous release being the exception) that means that the merge window for 3.17 is obviously open. And for the third time in a row, the timing sucks for me, as I have travel coming up the second week of the merge window. Many other core developers will be traveling too, since it’s just before the kernel summit in Chicago. So we’ll see how the next merge window goes, but I’m not going to worry about it overmuch. If I end up not having time to do all the merges, I might delay things into the week of the kernel summit, but I’ll hope to get most of the big merging done this upcoming week before any travel takes place, so maybe it won’t come […]

July 1, 2014 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

Linaro 14.06 Release with Linux Kernel 3.15 and Android 4.4.3

Linaro 14.06 has been released last week with Linux Kernel 3.15 (baseline), Linux Kernel 3.10.44 (LSK), and Android has been updated to 4.4.3. One interesting development this month is that Android for ARMv8 (64-bit ARM) is booting on the fast models using ARM Trusted firmware and U-Boot. SELinux has been enabled in Android. I could not see much new member hardware, except possibly B2120 (HDK) reference board for STMicro STiH407 “Monaco” STB SoC. Here are the highlights of this release: Linux Linaro 3.15-2014.06 GATOR version 5.18 (same version as in 2014.04) updated basic Capri board support from Broadcom LT cortex-strings-arm64 topic (same as in 2014.02) updated Versatile Express ARM64 support (FVP Base and Foundation models, Juno) from ARM LT. updated Versatile Express patches from ARM LT more HiP0x Cortex A15 family updates from HiSilicon LT (hip04_eth, hip04_defconfig) updated LLVM topic Big endian support (same as in 2014.05) ftrace_audit topic from […]

June 30, 2014 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

Emtrion DIMM-AM335x SoM Supports Mainline Linux Kernel

When I cover system-on-modules (SoM), companies will usually provide some BSP (Board Support Packages) for older kernels, and did not submit their changes to mailine kernel, so I was interested in a news from Emtrion entitled “DIMM-AM335x: Linux mainline support ready“, which actually means they’ve done the work to support a recent Linux kernel (3.14) and provides instructions and code (device tree files), but did not submit patches to the linux-arm-kernel mailing list to get their changes added to kernel.org. Let’s look at the hardware specs first: SoC – Texas Instruments Sitara AM335x ARM Cortex A8 processor @ 720Mhz to 1GHz (AM3354 or AM3359) System Memory – onboard 512 MB SDRAM/optional 256 MB Storage – 512 MB NAND Flash (managed) + 2 SD card interfaces Display – LCDs I/F with resolution up to SVGA, with 4-wire touch interface Audio – Analog Audio with SSI I/F USB – USB 2.0 Host […]

June 13, 2014June 13, 2014 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 6 Comments

Marvell Armada 370 Processor Datasheet Released, Mainline Linux Kernel Supported on Netgear ReadyNAS 102/104

Free Electrons has been working on porting several ARM SoC to the Linux kernel (mainline), including Marvell XP and 370 SoCs, and they’ve been informed by Marvell that the company finally released Marvell Armada 370 processor publicly without requiring NDA nor registration. Marvell Armada XP dual and quad core processors datasheet found in higher-end NAS and cloud servers has not been released (yet), but we’ve been told many peripheral blocks are very similar, so Marvell Armada 370 datasheet can also be used for Armada XP processors to some extend. Two documents have actually been released for Marvell Armada 370: the functional specification and the hardware specification (datasheet). The first document is actually the one with the most information with 1148 pages providing details about peripherals, against 164 pages for the latter providing details about pins and electrical characteristics. So we’ve got an ARM SoC with mainline kernel support, and decent […]

June 11, 2014May 29, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments

Linux 3.15 Released

Linus Torvalds announced the release of Linux Kernel 3.15 last Sunday: So I ended up doing an rc8 because I was a bit worried about some last-minute dcache fixes, but it turns out that nobody seemed to even notice those. We did have other issues during the week, though, so it was just as well. The futex fixes and cleanups may stand out, but as usual there’s various other random fixes since rc8 in there too: mainly drivers (drm, networking, sound, usb etc), networking, scheduling and perf tooling. But it’s all been fairly small and quiet, which *may* of course be due to the fact that last week was also the first week of the merge window for 3.16. That might have distracted some developers. I’m not entirely convinced I liked the overlap, but it seemed to work ok, and unless people scream really loudly (“Please don’t _ever_ do that again”) and give good […]