linaro News - Page 20 of 27 - CNX Software

June 13, 2012May 29, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 81 Comments

Hardware Packs for AllWinner A10 Devices and Easier Method to Create a Bootable Ubuntu 12.04 SD Card

Linaro has a tool called linaro-media-create to install Linaro Ubuntu to an SD card by passing the device, hardware pack file, the rootfs and the board as arguments. Hardware packs are files that contains hardware specific binaries and configs files (e.g. bootloader, kernel…). I’ve done something similar (albeit more basic) for AllWinner A10 devices so that you can easily install and run Ubuntu (and possibly other distributions) on an SD card. I’ve written 2 scripts for this: a10-hwpack-bld.sh – Script to generate evb.bin, build the latest u-boot and linux kernel, retrieve some config files and compress all this in an hardware pack file a1x-media-create.sh – Script to make a bootable SD card for AllWinner A10 devices. You can get the scripts with git:

git clone git://github.com/cnxsoft/a10-tools.git

1	git clone git://github.com/cnxsoft/a10-tools.git

I’ve only tested it with Mele A1000, but if you have other A10 devices such as MK802 mini PC or MINI X media player, it should […]

June 3, 2012June 18, 2018 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 30 Comments

Linaro Android Puts Stock Android To Shame on TI Pandaboard (OMAP4430)

The team at Linaro has done an amazing job at optimizing Android 4.0 for ARM and Bernhard Rosenkränzer, Android Engineer at Linaro among other things, has put all those optimizations together to showcase a demo at Linaro Connect Q2.2012 in Hong Kong with 2 pandaboards: One running Stock Android 4.0.4, the one released by Google (AOSP) One running Linaro Android 4.0.4 Both hardware, android version and benchmark software (oxBench) are the same, and the results are quite amazing with Android Linaro achieving about 60 fps in all 0xBenchmark tests (OpenGL Cube, OpenGL Blending, OpenGL Fog and Flying Teapot) whereas Android stock achieving 30 fps. They selected a benchmark tool that is mainly CPU bound, as they cannot optimize the GPU code since they can only access binary blobs. Apparently, most of the improvements were possible thanks to toolchain and code optimization (to be able to build) such as using gcc […]

June 1, 2012June 1, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

Linaro 12.05 Release with Kernel 3.4 and Android 4.0.4

Linaro has just released version 12.05 based on Linux Kernel 3.4 and Android 4.0.4. This release provides lots of improvement for Origen (Samsung Exynos 4) on Android, further work has been done on big.LITTLE processing and ARMv8 work appears to have started for Ubuntu and Debian. armel vs armhf benchmarks show a massive improvement (up to 15x) when using armhf for povray (3D rendering),. but for most other tests, there is little improvement, and in some rare cases armhf is slightly slower than armel. Here are the highlights of the release: Android Created a stable Google hangout build for Origen Updated DS-5 and gator daemon to 5.10 Stress tests from big.LITTLE testing have been integrated into LAVA Completed big.LITTLE Android tasks Monkeyrunner tests for automating common Android usage have been integrated into LAVA Ordered a new power measurement device from National Instruments Updated and Origen 3.4 rc7 Completed Android HAL […]

May 24, 2012May 24, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Ubuntu, Tizen, XMBC… Demos at Q2.12 Linaro Connect in Hong Kong

Linaro has announced several demos would take place at Linaro Connect on June 1st, 2012 in Hong Kong: Big.LITTLE in-kernel Switcher (Linaro) SIProp – Combat Scouter – How much your Combat Power? (SIProp) Android Toolchain Improvements (Linaro) Origen Running Awesome Code (Linaro) Snowball with MM enablement (Linaro) Tizen on Snowball (Linaro) Google+ Hangouts on an ARM Board (Linaro) Low-Cost Logic Analyzer (Linaro) XBMC on Snowball – ST Ericsson Snowball (Linaro) (Ubuntu) Unity 3D on Snowball (Linaro) Ubuntu TV on Snowball (Linaro) PCM (Phase Change Memory) : Linaro kernel meets with the PCM technology (Micron) ARM DS-5 & Linaro (ARM) Most of the demos will be organized by Linaro, but three others companies will also shown the “show”, namely SIProp, Micron and ARM. It’s always interested to see what happens at Linaro because it gives a view into the future to what may comes to the new products and developers can see what new features are available for […]

May 18, 2012May 22, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

Getting Ubuntu armel/armhf Rootfs in Ubuntu 12.04

I’ve recently upgraded to Ubuntu 12.04 and this is a great operating system. However, if you do some arm development and expect to be able to install cross libraries (armel/armhf) or easily generate an arm rootfs using the tools you’ve been used to, you’ll be disappointed. In Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric), I used xapt and dpkg-cross to retrieve armel libraries, but it’s broken for Ubuntu 12.04, at least on my system. I’ve been told to switch to multiarch because this will be how it’s done from now on. But I soon discovered this is work in progress as quite a few packages are not multiarched yet including python. Ubuntu developers also decided to remove rootstock (which makes sense since xapt/dpkg-cross will be deprecated), so if you want to generate a rootfs the “gool ol’” way (which won’t be supported much longer), you’d have to install an Oneric chroot to run rootstock, […]

May 4, 2012May 29, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 13 Comments

Xibo Digital Signage Running on Mele A1000 AllWinner A10 Set-Top Box

Those following my blog know that I recently bought a Mele A1000 to play around. For those who are not familiar with this device, the Mele A1000 is a $70 Android set-top box featuring an AllWinner A10 cortex A8 processor and lots of peripherals, and it can easily be hacked to run a Linux distributions. This hardware would also be a great digital signage player thanks to its video playback capabilities: up to 2160p video decoding and 1080p video output. Last year, I ported Xibo, an open source digital signage player, to ARM and ran it in the Beagleboard emulator (qemu), but I hadn’t had the opportunity to try it out in a real hardware. I’ve tried this rootfs based on Linaro ARM Linux Internet Platform (ALIP) image for BeagleBoard in the Mele A1000, by following an adaptation of the method I provided earlier. For this demo, I created a […]

May 2, 2012August 13, 2013 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 18 Comments

Getting Started with MultiArch (armel / armhf) in Ubuntu

Until now, I used xapt and dpkg-cross to install cross libraries for armel, but since I’ve upgraded to Ubuntu 12.04, it appears to be broken. I’ve contacted Linaro about this issue, and the “cross-building” expert at Linaro (wookey) recommended me to use multiarch instead, as xapt/dpkg-cross will be eventually deprecated. He provided me an example showing how-to use multiarch to build Chromium. I’ve been looking for a “How-to multiarch”, but haven’t been able to find something really clear and simple, so I thought I would post it here. In the example, they used a chroot for cross-building, which is probably a good idea to avoid messing up with the system. It’s also possible multiarch is not 100% reliable, and I’ve read stories where people messed up their system when using multiarch with i386 (32-bit) and amd64 (64-bit). Preparing a chroot for cross-building I’ll use a 32-bit Ubuntu precise chroot, but […]

April 27, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Linaro 12.04 Release with Kernel 3.4 and Android 4.0.4

Linaro has just released version 12.04 based on Linux Kernel 3.4-rc3 and Android 4.0.4_r1.1. This release already provides Ubuntu 12.04 LTS images for Pandaboard, Snowball, Origen and Versatile Express, and all community builds (nano, ALIP…) are based on Ubuntu Precise Pangolin as well. This should provide significant performance boosted compared to Ubuntu 11.10 thanks to hard-float support and other optimization (See Phoronix Benchmarks). A lot of work since to have gone into big.LITTLE implementation, HTML5 is now supported in Firefox, and it seems Linaro is still working on ARMv6 as they provided VP8 optimizations and improved the toolchain for this architecture. Here are the highlights of the release: Android Finished Snowball Multimedia enablement. Updated all builds to AOSP ICS 4.0.4_r1.1. Switched all builds to 4.7. Updated base toolchain components MPFR and GMP. Ported htop to Android. Ported stressapptest to Android for big.LITTLE Testing. Implemented and ran weekly big.LITTLE tests. Integrated […]