LTSI (Long-Term Stable Initiative) Status Update – ELCE 2012

Tsugikazu Shibata, chief manager of OSS promotion center at NEC, gives a status update for LTSI, an LTS kernel for the consumer electronics market at ELCE 2012. Abstract: LTSI (Long-Term Stable Initiative) had been established October 2011 as an activity of CE Working Group of The Linux Foundation. LTSI will maintain Linux kernel for long term and stable for use of Consumer Electronics industry to share common cost and also help industry engineers to merge their patches into upstream. This talk will update latest status of LTSI project and discuss about next step such as how the development process going on and what version of Linux kernel will be maintained for long term and stably use. This talk will be intended to provide information for managers and engineers in the embedded industry and not necessary to have specific knowledge. Agenda of the talk: Status of Linux kernel development and maintenance […]

The End of Embedded Linux (As We Know It) – ELCE 2012

Chris Simmonds, freelance consultant and trainer (2net ltd), discusses the future of embedded Linux now that storage and processing power are no longer an major issue, and try to find the best Linux platform for embedded systems at ELCE 2012. Abstract: Embedded Linux is at a cross roads where the combination of Moore’s law making devices more powerful and the mass production of consumer devices, especially mobile, making them cheaper means that the old ways no longer work. Only a few years ago we though in mega: MHz, MBytes, MBits/s. Now we have to think in giga. The days of the single core CPU are almost over, as are the days of the QVGA display. All this means that there is a need to re-think how embedded devices are programmed. Two obvious roads lie ahead: Android and Ubuntu (or other desktop operating system of your choice). This talk considers the […]

The Yocto Project Release 1.3

The Yocto Project Release 1.3 has just been announced. This release codenamed “Danny” and based on Poky 8.0 is the fifth release of the project. The Yocto Project is a framework to assist developers in creating embedded Linux distributions. New features and updates for the Yocto Project 1.3 Improved terminal UI, which makes it easy to see the tasks that are currently executing, and avoids burying any warnings that are printed. Eliminated intermediate step when building cross compiler toolchain Relocatable SDK Large number of usability improvements in the Hob image building UI Upgraded eglibc to version 2.16 Upgraded gcc to version 4.7 Upgraded Linux kernel version to 3.4.11 Added yocto-bsp script for automating the initial parts of creating a new BSP Python functions now consistently use four spaces for indentation –  no more having to try to match the mix of tabs and spaces in your recipes Disabled sharing shared […]

Intel to Give Away 5 Atom D2700 Development Kits to Selected Engineers

As part of its “Eureka! Design Challenges“, Intel is asking hardware engineers to submit ideas about what they’ll do with an Intel Atom D2700 development kit with 2Gb RAM, a 40 GB SSD drive & lots of ports and expansions, and will give one to the 5 candidates with the best project ideas. Here are the key features of this development kit: Development board with the Intel Atom Processor D2700, and IntelNM10 Express Chipset Board Support package from the Linux Foundation’s Yocto Project 2GB DDR21066 MT/s non-ECC memory 40GB SSD, installed, with SATA extension cable Power supply The Intel Software Development Tool Suite (GNU tool compatible) Documentation and software Comes in a mini-ITX chassis with dual independent display capabilities. I’m not sure why Intel is focusing on hardware engineer for this type of project, and I suppose if you have some embedded systems development ideas that interface with external hardware, […]

ISEE Announces Low Cost IGEP COM ELECTRON & SPIN Computers-on-Module

ISEE, the manufacturer of the IGEPv2 board, has recently announced 2 new industrial grade computers on module based on TI Sitara AM3703 Cortex A8 Processor: IGEP COM ELECTRON – AM3703 with 256 MB RAM / 512 MB Flash – 59 Euros IGEP COM SPIN – AM3703 with 64 MB RAM / 128 MB Flash – 49 Euros Here are the specifications of IGEP COM ELECTRON module: CPU – Texas Instruments AM3703 @ 1GHz with L1 cache (112 KB (DSP) / 64 KB (ARM)) and L2 cache (96 KB (DSP), 256 KB (ARM)) System Memory – 256 MB Mobile DDR @ 200 MHz (32-bit) Storage: 512 MB NAND FLASH On board micro-SD socket Connectors: 1 x USB 2.0 OTG interface + USB mini-AB connector 1 x MICRO-SD socket 2 x EXPANSION 70-pin connector Device: 1 x USB 2.0 HOST (connector NOT included) 1 x DOUBLE LED INDICATOR Expansion connectors – 2 […]

LinuxCon North America 2012 Schedule

LinuxCon (North America) 2012 will take place on August 29 – 31, 2012 at Sheraton Hotel & Marina, in San Diego, California. The event will be co-located with the Linux Kernel Summit, the Linux Plumbers Conference, and CloudOpen 2012. LinuxCon consists of 3 days of keynotes, business and developers related sessions as well as tutorials. There will be over 80 sessions and keynotes during those 3 days. I’ll highlight a few sessions that I find particularly interesting and related to embedded Linux, software development and ARM. August 29 10:45 – 11:30 – Life After BerkeleyDB: OpenLDAP’s Memory-Mapped Database by Howard Chu, Symas Abstract: OpenLDAP’s new MDB library is a highly optimized B+tree implementation that is orders of magnitude faster and more efficient than everything else in the software world. Reads scale perfectly linearly across arbitrarily many CPUs with no bottlenecks, and data is returned with zero memcpy’s. Writes are on […]

Yocto Project Release 1.2 Announced

The Yocto Project Release 1.2 has just been announced. This release codenamed “Denzil” and based on Poky 7.0 is the third release of the project. The project 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. Yocto Project 1.2 Features: HOB redesigned with new user interface and work flow. HOB is a GUI based tool for users to customize and build an embedded Linux image in a more intuitive and easier way. Build appliance, which is a set of changes and enhancements to enable users to build a virtual machine image running Linux built with the Yocto Project. Within the Linux running on the virtual machine, users can customize and build their own customized embedded Linux images. Error message handling improvement, making error message more efficient, useful and accurate to users. New kernel update […]

The Yocto Project Overview and Update – ELC 2012

Saul Wold, User Space Architect at Intel Open Source Technology Center, discusses the latest on the Yocto Project at the Embedded Linux Conference 2012. Abstract: The Yocto Project is a joint project to unify the world’s efforts around embedded Linux and to make Linux the best choice for embedded designs. The Yocto Project is an open source starting point for embedded Linux development which contains tools, templates, methods and actual working code to get started with an embedded device project. In addition, the Yocto Project includes Eclipse plug-ins to assist the developer. This talk gives a walk-through of the key parts of the Yocto Project for developing embedded Linux projects. In addition, features will be described from the latest release of Yocto. At the end of the talk, developers should be able to start their own embedded project using the Yocto Project and use it for developing the next great […]

EmbeddedTS embedded systems design