linaro News - Page 17 of 27 - CNX Software

January 9, 2013 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments

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 […]

December 31, 2012May 29, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 6 Comments

Linaro 12.12 Release with Linux Kernel 3.7 and Android 4.2.1

Linaro release 12.12 has just been announced, and includes Linux Kernel 3.7 and Android 4.2.1. The tracking version (stable release) uses Kernel 3.4.22. This release upgrades Android to version 4.2.1, Ubuntu images are now based on Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) and Linaro U-Boot 2012.12 has been released with support for Origen 4 Quad and Arndale boards. Further improvements have been done for OpenEmbedded ARMv8, where they replaced the php Apache module by php-fpm among other things. On the kernel side, USB drivers have been refactored, and a kernel size analysis have been performed on several platforms. The power management team has mainly worked on big.LITTLE IKS and MP implementations, and it’s the first time LEG (Linaro Enterprise Group) is included in the release, and they worked on UEFI for ARM, GRUB for U-Boot, and provided a Ubuntu server image for Arndale board which can boot via UEFI or UBoot. Here […]

December 9, 2012May 29, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 31 Comments

Cubieboard Unboxing and Quick Start Guide

I’ve received another cool board this week with the Cubieboard development board. As a quick reminder, the Cubieboard is the only proper low cost AllWinner A10 development board available, and comes with 512MB/1GB RAM, 4GB NAND Flash, 10/100 MBit Ethernet, HDMI output, 2x USB Host port, 1x USB OTG port, a microSD socket, a SATA interface, an IR sensor and 2 headers to access extra pins such as GPIOs, I2C, SPI,VGA pins, CVBS pins etc… CubieTech had a successful Indiegogo campaign where the 1GB board was available for $59 including worldwide shipping (and as low as $19 for early birds), and you can now buy it from resellers. [Update: It’s now available with several cables, USB to TTL debug board, and an enclosure for $80 on dx.com] Cubieboard Unboxing The board comes with a SATA cable and a USB cable for power. There’s no power supply so you’ll need you […]

November 30, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Linaro 12.11 Release with Linux Kernel 3.7 and Android 4.2

Linaro release 12.11 has just been announced, and includes Linux Kernel 3.7-rc2 and Android 4.2. The tracking version (stable release) uses Kernel 3.4.19. This release upgrade Android to version 4.2, adds support for Origen 4 Quad board, and you can now use perf profiling utility in Linaro Android. Initial GRUB support for ARM is now available, the Ubuntu Precise server image is back online and lots of updates have been done on the kernel, mainly for Android, device tree and big.LITTLE. Here are the highlights of the release: Android Platform Enablement Android upgraded from 4.1.2 to 4.2 to all the platforms Android builds are available for Origen 4412 board setup Improvements to click-through license infrastructure MP3 playback enabled for ARM Versatile Express and Samsung Origen (4210 and 4412) Fixed riff USB issue on newer laptops Testing/LAVA Re-enabled Android CTS testing Integrated the new Methanol browser test Upstreaming Perf patch was […]

November 29, 2012November 29, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

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 […]

November 26, 2012November 26, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 5 Comments

Big.LITTLE Processing Implementations and Current Status

There was a big,LITTLE mini-summit during Linaro Connect Europe 2012, where an update was given on current big.LITTLE implementations and the results of measurement of power vs performance. Big.LITTLE Processing Implementations Overview As briefly mentioned in “Versatile Express TC2 (2xA15, 3xA7) Development Board at ARM Techcon 2012“, there are 2 big.LITTLE implementations: In-kernel switcher (IKS) This implementation is already available through Linaro and only required minimal changed to the kernel as it mainly an augmentation to DVFS (Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling) except instead of only adjusting voltage and frequency depending on the load, it will also move the load to different cores. The main drawback is that this implementation only uses half the cores. For example, on a 2x Cortex A15 / 2x Cortex A7 system, it can only use 2 cores at the same time (either A15 or A7 cores), as the load is managed between one type […]

November 24, 2012December 18, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

List of Android Benchmarks, Optimizations Results & Benchmarks Analysis

Linaro Connect Europe occurred in Copenhagen on Oct. 29 – Nov. 2 2012 (LCE12) and included 3 mini-summits about Android, big.LITTLE and ARMv8. Linaro has recently posted the presentation slides and I’ll have a look at a few of those slides in details and try to post information that I feel can be interesting. Today. I’ll go over the “Benchmarking and Optimization Opportunities” slides, where we can learn which Android Benchmarks Linaro use, how they’ve decreased benchmark results variance, which parts of the system are actually tested by benchmarks (profiling), and what they plan to do to further optimize Android on ARM. When I do some reviews, I usually simply use Antutu and Quadrant benchmarks to assess the performance of the devices, but Linaro uses many more benchmarks which I’ll list below. I’ll provide 2 links for each benchmark. The first link is to the official website and the other […]