“Enriching, simplifying and expanding people’s digital lives by securing valued services on smart devices”

 

We are well on our way to that goal already due to the great work each of the founding partners have already done but there is still much to do. Keep an eye on the Trustonic website for exciting announcements soon.

I’m two weeks into my new role as Program Manager of the Secure Services Division at ARM and I’m already loving it. It was sad to say goodbye to all my Canonical and Linaro friends but I’m sure our paths will cross again in the near future.

Hi,

Linaro is pleased to announce that the 11.05 Beta Ubuntu images are now
available to download.

After much blood, sweat and tears we now have a total of 10 different
boards supported (in our own unique hardware pack and board-neutral
rootfs architecture) along with a more focused 4 different images to try
out including the much coveted Ubuntu Unity interface on the Ubuntu Desktop
image. This is in addition to the small nano image, the tools rich
Developer image and the ARM Internet Platform (ALIP) image. A 2.6.38 kernel,
state-of-the-art Linaro toolchain and a whole host of ARM-related
improvements make for a thrilling release. What are you waiting for, go
download it now!

As always, if you have supported hardware, as found on:

http://releases.linaro.org/platform/linaro-n/hwpacks/beta/

please help our initiative by testing the official Linaro Evaluation
Build (LEB):

Ubuntu Desktop:

http://releases.linaro.org/platform/linaro-n/ubuntu-desktop/beta/

and our Developer images:

Nano:

http://releases.linaro.org/platform/linaro-n/nano/beta/

ALIP:

http://releases.linaro.org/platform/linaro-n/alip/beta/

Developer Tools:

http://releases.linaro.org/platform/linaro-n/developer/beta/

As a side note, hwpacks that have an -lt- in their name are outputs from
the Linaro Landing teams, using some of their components.

Make your way to:

http://wiki.linaro.org/Releases/MilestoneBuilds

for an explanation on how to test and submit your results to the QA
tracker at:

http://qatracker.linaro.org

Linaro is a huge project participating in many open source communities and working on a whole host of improvements for the Linux on ARM space. Monitoring all this good work and ensuring deliverables are on track is the task of a new project which was just rolled out called Status.

Linaro engineering is done in cycles, each of which is six months in length so Status always shows information for the current cycle. There are plans to extend this to show past and future work too.

Technical Requirements, Blueprints, Work Items and Burndown Charts

Status is an evolution from the burndown method of tracking which Ubuntu uses (Ubuntu’s current burndown can be see here) but using a combination of process and code changes, shows more of a requirement focused view. This is because Linaro decided early on to use the notion of Technical Requirements, driving engineering effort from the top down to generate work items to be done. These requirements are gathered before the start of each cycle and the process involves partner discussions, community involvement and public review. This is well documented on the Linaro wiki, suffice to say this process generates a lot of work.

These high level requirements are then broken down into Blueprints and finally into Work Items and Status is there to help make sense of all this.

Status Breakdown

The main Status page shows the progress towards the work done in Linaro and links off to more information on a per-Technical Requirement basis. To get at a more focused breakdown the header toolbar across the top of the Status webpage allows you to view the information per team, per milestone or even per individual. All of these views give you a window in to the work being done during the Linaro Engineering Cycle (currently Linaro 11.05).

Navigating around the site gives you a great sense of achievement. Linaro is undertaking a huge amount of engineering work and with Status, visualising that effort just became a lot easier.

Over the coming months we will be improving Status to incorporate more information but for now, I give you status.linaro.org.

Hi,

The Linaro team is pleased to announce the availability of the 11.05
Alpha-2 images. These are still very early developer images but we
encourage all with supported hardware to use and test them by
downloading from:

http://releases.linaro.org/platform/linaro-n/

Highlights of this release include:

* Added Gumstix Overo support.
* New Developer image including console base developer tools.
* Complete rewrite of the installation tools (linaro-image-tools) to
improve the user experience.
* A staggering 141 out of 160 packages have been upgraded since
Alpha-1.

The images consist of two parts. A hardware pack which can be found
under the ./hwpacks directory which contains hardware specific packages
such as the kernel and bootloader. The second part is the rootfs which
is combined with the hardware pack to create a complete image. For
information on how to create an image please see:

http://wiki.linaro.org/Releases/MilestoneBuilds

More information on Linaro in general and the 11.05 plans can be
found at:

* Homepage: http://www.linaro.org
* Wiki: http://wiki.linaro.org
* 11.05: http://wiki.linaro.org/Releases/1105

Also subscribe to the important Linaro mailing lists and join our IRC
channels to stay on top of Linaro developments:

* Announcements:

http://lists.linaro.org/mailman/listinfo/linaro-announce

* Development:

http://lists.linaro.org/mailman/listinfo/linaro-dev

* IRC:
#linaro on irc.linaro.org or irc.freenode.net

For any errata issues please see:

http://wiki.linaro.org/Releases/1105/Alpha2#Issues

Bug reports for this release should be filed in Launchpad against the
individual packages that are affected, if a suitable package cannot be
identified, feel free to assign them to:

http://www.launchpad.net/linaro

Regards,
Jamie.
–
Linaro Release Manager

Read more over on the Linaro wiki.

In Linaro we monitor download statistics for each of our images to try to figure out exactly what our consumers want to see from them. Initially, it was thought that a well integrated ‘console-only’ image for testing and verification on ARM hardware would be the most popular, especially as modern ARM hardware usually comes in the form of a bare board at the moment. Its been refreshing to see that our audience want much more than a console prompt.

It seems an Ubuntu-like experience is particularly attractive to holders of ARM based hardware. The list of images we currently produce is being evaluated at the moment to further target our audience but its clear that an Ubuntu-like experience is the de-facto for ARM devices.

Linaro is such an obviously winning idea that it’s very surprising that this sort of initiative didn’t coalesce years ago. (If the gentle reader has some scars to prove their veteran status of earlier attempts at Linaro-like initiatives, I’d be happy to do an anonymized interview …) Whatever the history, ARM made it crystal clear that they are supporting Linaro any way they can.”

Hi,

The Linaro team is pleased to announce the availability of the 11.05
Alpha-1 images. These very early developer images build on the great
work done during the 10.11 cycle and can be downloaded from the
following location:

http://releases.linaro.org/platform/linaro-n/

The images consist of two parts. A hardware pack which can be found
under the ./hwpacks directory contains hardware specific packages such
as the kernel and bootloader. The second part is the rootfs which is
combined with the hardware pack to create a complete image. For
information on how to create an image please see:

http://wiki.linaro.org/Releases/MilestoneBuilds

More information on Linaro in general and the 11.05 plans can be
found at:

* Homepage: http://www.linaro.org
* Wiki: http://wiki.linaro.org
* 11.05: http://wiki.linaro.org/Releases/1105

Also subscribe to the important Linaro mailing lists and join our IRC
channels to stay on top of Linaro developments:

* Announcements:

http://lists.linaro.org/mailman/listinfo/linaro-announce

* Development:

http://lists.linaro.org/mailman/listinfo/linaro-dev

* IRC:
#linaro on irc.freenode.net

For any errata issues please see:

http://wiki.linaro.org/Releases/1105/Alpha1#Issues

Bug reports for this release should be filed in Launchpad against the
individual packages that are affected, if a suitable package cannot be
identified, feel free to assign them to:

http://www.launchpad.net/linaro

Regards,
Jamie.
–
Linaro Release Manager

Currently the team is broken down into the following groups which are responsible for everything from the kernel right through to accelerating the user interface.

Linaro is continuing to expand and today there are positions available related to our Landing Teams, kernel engineering and office management.

So if you want to be part of this great team that is changing the Linux on ARM landscape, go right now to the Linaro Careers section.

George Grey, Linaro CEO

Jesse Barker, Linaro Graphics Working Group lead

Hi,

The Linaro team is pleased to announce the release of Linaro 10.11.
10.11 is the first public release that brings together the huge amount
of engineering effort that has occurred within Linaro over the past 6
months. In addition to officially supporting the TI OMAP3 (Beagle
Board and Beagle Board XM) and ARM Versatile Express platforms, the
images have been tested and verified on a total of 7 different platforms
including TI OMAP4 Panda Board, IGEPv2, Freescale iMX51 and ST-E U8500.

The advances that have happened in this cycle are numerous but include a
completely rebuilt archive using GCC 4.4.4 and the latest ARM optimised
tool chain, the Linux kernel version 2.6.35, support for
cross-compiling, a new hardware pack way of building images, 3D
acceleration improvements, u-boot enhancements and initial device tree
support, a new QA tracking structure, the list goes on. For a full
break-down of what was scheduled for the 10.11 release please see:

http://wiki.linaro.org/Releases/1011/Blueprints

Thanks to everyone involved who made this happen. Here’s looking forward
to a sucessful 11.05 release.

To get Linaro 10.11
——————-

The 10.11 release can be found at:

http://releases.linaro.org/platform/linaro-m/headless/final/

and when combined with a hwpack from:

http://releases.linaro.org/platform/linaro-m/hwpacks/final/

using the instructions from:

http://wiki.linaro.org/Releases/MilestoneBuilds

a installable image is produced.

For any errata issues please see:

http://wiki.linaro.org/Releases/1011/Final#Issues

Bug reports for this release should be filed in Launchpad against the
individual packages that are affected, if a suitable package cannot be
identified, feel free to assign them to:

http://www.launchpad.net/linaro

The team has also produced 3 other non-supported images as part of a
community effort, they are:

* ALIP
* http://releases.linaro.org/platform/linaro-m/alip/final/
* EFL based netbook
* http://releases.linaro.org/platform/linaro-m/netbook/final/
* KDE based plasma handset
* http://releases.linaro.org/platform/linaro-m/plasma/final/

These need to be combined with a hardware pack as above.

Next Steps
———-

Engineering effort has already started on the 11.05 cycle. For more
information on what Linaro will be doing this cycle please see:

http://wiki.linaro.org/Releases/1105

Getting involved
—————-

If you would like to help shape the Linux on ARM space and Linaro in
particular please take a look at:

http://wiki.linaro.org/GettingInvolved

About Linaro
————

More information on Linaro in general and the 10.11 release can be found
at:

* Homepage: http://www.linaro.org
* Wiki: http://wiki.linaro.org
* 10.11: http://wiki.linaro.org/Releases/1011

Also subscribe to the important Linaro mailing lists and join our IRC
channels to stay on top of Linaro developments:

* Announcements:

http://lists.linaro.org/mailman/listinfo/linaro-announce

* Development:

http://lists.linaro.org/mailman/listinfo/linaro-dev

* IRC:
#linaro on irc.freenode.net

Regards,
Jamie.
–
Linaro Release Manager

A couple of days ago I intercepted a package meant for Marcin Juszkiewicz on the promise I would give him it back in a weeks time at the Linaro@UDS event. This package contained a shiny new TI OMAP4-based Pandaboard. Now, the run up to a UDS event is always super busy but I managed to steal a few hours here and there and with some last minute late night debugging with Canonical kernel engineer Lee Jones (borked UART settings in the end for those interested) the Linaro images now work on the Pandaboard. Special kudos to the Canonical ARM team who did all the heavy lifting to enable the Pandaboard in Ubuntu.

And before you say “it didn’t happen without pictures”, here they are.

Expect some video demo’s and more pictures of the various Linaro flavours soon.

The slides for this presentation can be found on slideshare.net and are available in many formats on my Linaro wiki page.

ARM are a humongous company, not so much in employee numbers and site buildings, but in the number of actual products that their technology comes to market with. From a seemingly small number of incredibly smart people comes a sales figure of nearly 3 ARM chips for every man, woman and child on the planet, a huge feat that, with recent partnership announcements, and rumors galore, is only going to get bigger.

ARM shares have gone from a level of just over 135 this time last year to well over 400 today and with ARM’s Q3 2010 Earnings release due Oct 26th, I’m sure we will see continued growth. But why all the fuss?

ARM has been around for a long time. Smartphones, set-top boxes, even a robot or two so what is going so right for ARM lately? Well their deal with Apple for the strangely named A4 (cleverly stripped Cortex-A8, ARMv7-A core) which went into the iPad, iPhone, iPod, Apple TV, and is now the corner-stone of Apples iOS solutions has helped, a deal with Microsoft, dozens of ARM based Android phones, and the odd Maemo/MeeGo phone helps. But now we have a new era. A time where ARM are moving out of their comfort zone and competing with the likes of Intel and AMD on performance, but this time doing it with an eye to power consumption. There are a lot of exciting things going on at ARM, not to mention their huge focus on Linux with Linaro, but their recent announcement of the ARM A15 architecture got me excited more than others.

Low Powered, Multi-Core, High Performance

The A15 is billed as having:

Unprecedented levels of performance, power-efficiency, and technology leadership

and reading the technical specs one can only wonder what is in store for this architecture. Some of the highlights include:

• Up to 2.5Gz clock speed
• Chip fabrication down to 28nm
• Address up to 1TB of memory
• Hardware Virtualisation
• Single to Quad core (and beyond) configurations
• Suitable for everything from phones to servers

Possibilities

So looking at the specifications, where is this chip likely to land? Well, its not quite that easy to guess as the processor itself is so versatile. If one were to attempt a guess one could hypothesise that we will see at least phones and netbooks but more importantly tablets, laptops, and servers. The last three, maybe four are new to ARM. But a chip so capable has its uses.

• For netbooks and laptops, a more powerful CPU is essential. Couple this with low power consumption and an increasingly powerful user experience from Ubuntu, Linaro and other Linux distributions equates to a great portable laptop device.
• Tablets are the new buzz word. Android is the main contender to Apple at the moment although RIM have just announced their PlayBook and HP cannot be discounted with their acquisition of PALM and WebOS. If its not an Apple device then its most likely to be Linux based (unless its the QNX RIM tablet) and what better way to utilise that than to use a flavour that is highly optimised for ARM based Linux devices.
• Servers are uncharted territory for ARM. Quietly, bubbling up amongst the tech crowd is the notion that vast arrays of hot, expensive to run, power-hungry x86 based servers could be replaced by cold, cheap, powerful ARM servers. For a company who pays millions (upon millions) of dollars for a server farm, saving money on both climate control to cool servers and their electricity bill is huge news. Couple that with the fact that ARM servers could be cheaper to purchase and you get a lot of buzz in this area. One such company that caught this curve early was SmoothStone. Expect to see a huge uptake in the interest of ARM based servers in the coming 12 months.

Conclusion

ARM based devices are ubiquitous, just like Linux. You may of not of even heard of ARM, just like you may not of heard of Linux, but making a phone call or searching on Google means you could already using their respective technologies.

ARM, just like Linux, is a quiet pioneer, prevalent in the background just waiting for the opportunity to become mainstream. Whether mainstream is the goal, prevalence most definitely is on the agenda.

Hi,

Another month, another release. Today sees the launch of the Linaro
Beta image which will in-turn become the final release in November.
The team have been working super-hard to ensure bugs are at a
minimum whist bring in new exciting functionality.

Highlights of this release include:

* Support for the ARM Versatile Express platform which supplements
the existing OMAP image.
* Support is now available for OMAP Beagle Board C3/C4, OMAP
Beagle Board XM, ARM Versatile Express, and with some
modifications OMAP Panda Board, IGEPv2, Freescale iMX51.
* Three new experimental seeds are available which enable the
headless image to be supplemented by a particular install
flavor:
o linaro-netbook-efl – Netbook user interface using the EFL based
netbook-launcher
o linaro-alip – A reduced size installation, see
http://linux.onarm.com/index.php/Main_Page for more details on
ALIP
o linaro-handset-plasma – A KDE/Plasma based user interface.
* 35 upgraded packages since alpha-3.
* Includes the 2.6.35 final kernel.
* Tested using the new QA Tracking infrastructure located at
http://qatracker.linaro.org/

More information on this development release as well as download and
installation instructions can be found at:

http://wiki.linaro.org/Releases/1011/Beta

More information on Linaro in general and the 10.11 plans can be found
at:

* Homepage: http://www.linaro.org
* Wiki: http://wiki.linaro.org
* 10.11: http://wiki.linaro.org/Releases/1011

Also subscribe to the important Linaro mailing lists and join our IRC
channels to stay on top of Linaro developments:

* Announcements: http://lists.linaro.org/mailman/listinfo/linaro-announce
* Development: http://lists.linaro.org/mailman/listinfo/linaro-dev
* IRC: #linaro on irc.freenode.net

For any errata issues please see:

http://wiki.linaro.org/Releases/1011/Beta#Issues

Bug reports for this release should be filed in Launchpad against the
individual packages that are affected, if a suitable package cannot be
identified, feel free to assign them to:

http://www.launchpad.net/linaro

Regards,
Jamie.
–
Linaro Release Manager

A Technical Look at Linux at Oracle – Wim Coekaerts

Wim is a great speaker and the topic was new to me so I listened intently. Unfortunately Oracle followed up by promptly suing Google.

Mobile Linux: Adapting Practices, Driving Innovation, Collaboration, and Scalability – Rob Chandhok

Rob outlined Qualcomms Open Source effort. They do a lot of good work with Linux and their latest announcement, that they would be making an effort to consolidate work done in the ARM eco-sphere, echo’s what Linaro is tasked at achieving. I’m sure there will be a lot of overlap and collaboration going forward.

Android/Linux Kernel: Lessons Learned – Matthew Garrett

Matthew spent his time describing the failed attempt to get Android’s power management solution, suspend blockers, into the mainline kernel. It was a heated discussion at times but did highlight some failings on both Google’s and the kernel communities sides.

Linux Kernel Panel – James Bottomley, Jon Corbet, Dave Jones, Chris Mason, Ted Ts’o

Kernel panels, or round-tables, seem to be a common practice at many conferences and this was no exception. A good bunch of speakers, lots of questions from the audience including one or two on the status of the ARM kernel.

Open Source Software Adoption Patterns in Enterprise IT – Jeffrey Hammond

Jeffrey fired of statistics and facts about the studies his company have been doing with regards to Linux adoption. The facts proved interesting with a trend for an accelerated Linux adoption from the pool of people he surveyed.

MeeGo: Where Are We Now – Dawn Foster

Dawn gave a high-level introduction to MeeGo, the project bearing the fruits of the collaboration between Nokia and Intel. Nothing new was discussed but the level of interest in MeeGo was evident by the full room.

Doing What it Takes: Current Legal Issues in Defending FOSS – Eben Moglen

Listening to Eben speak is a pleasure in itself, let alone listening to him talk about a subject close to the heart of many open source developers. For someone to stand there for 30 mins, without slides or prompts, never fumble a word and capture the attention of everyone in the room, Eben must be commended.

Selling the Value of Open Source When Cost is Not the Driver – Ravi Simhambhatla

Virgin America wouldn’t be my obvious choice when selecting a company that really utilizes and ‘gets’ open source but Ravi’s explanation of how they use it, where they were before open source, and what they have planned for the future was captivating. Virgin America really are revolutionizing their internal IT departments by using Linux and they have even bigger plans for the future.

Overall a good event, looking forward to the next one.

Hi,

Well, it’s that time again, please all welcome Linaro Alpha 3 into the
world. This will be the final release before the beta version arrives
at the end of August and signals Linaro’s continued maturity towards
the final November image.

Highlights of this release include:

• A small Linaro headless image with basic OMAP3 beagle board support
  (reported working on other architectures with minimal changes).
• A new software archive rebuild with GCC 4.4.4, CodeSourcery
  enhancements and ARM-related improvements.
• Support for opengl ES development through MESA.
• GPS support via gypsy and geoclue.
• Netbook user interface capabilities with the latest EFL software
  stack.

More Information on this development release as well as download and
installation instructions can be found at:

http://wiki.linaro.org/Releases/1011/Alpha3

More information on Linaro in general and the 10.11 plans can be found
at:

• Homepage: http://www.linaro.org
• Wiki: http://wiki.linaro.org
• 10.11: http://wiki.linaro.org/Releases/1011

Also subscribe to the important Linaro mailing lists and join our IRC
channels to stay on top of Linaro developments:

• Announcements: http://lists.linaro.org/mailman/listinfo/linaro-announce
• Development: http://lists.linaro.org/mailman/listinfo/linaro-dev
• IRC: #linaro on irc.freenode.net

For any errata issues please see:

http://wiki.linaro.org/Releases/1011/Alpha3#Issues

Bug reports for this release should be filed in Launchpad against the
individual packages that are affected, if a suitable package cannot be
identified, please feel free to assign them to:

http://www.launchpad.net/linaro

Regards,
Jamie.
–
Linaro Release Manager

The original announcement can be found here.