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.

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.

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.

How do you boot a live cd session?

The first thing to do was find out why it was slow. There are a few ways to do this but I chose to first use simple time-stamping methods and afterwards, the much prettier bootchart package.

A bit of background on how the live cd session is booted. There are two broad steps in the process of booting a live cd, the first is setting up the environment ready for the session, and the second, you guessed it, is actually booting into the session. Initial hunches were that the first step, setting up the session, was the major cause of slowness so investigations started there.

Casper

Setting up the session is the responsibility of a project called casper. Casper is a set of scripts that are run on boot to do such things as unpack the initial filesystem, add a dummy user, setup languages and keyboard layouts and so forth. Its mainly written in perl.

The time-stamping stage of investigates confirmed that casper was indeed slower than it should be. I’ll skip ahead to the bootchart part of the story as thats much more visually interesting.

Casper before

Above you can see the casper section of the live cd boot process. I’ve highlighted the bits that immediately stand out. The overall boot was 3 minutes and 15 seconds with casper responsible for around 2 minutes of that.

The highlighted bits seemed to have one thing in common, they all interacted with the debconf database. From the debconf programmers tutorial document:

“debconf is a backend database, with a frontend that talks to it and presents an interface to the user. There can be many different types of frontends, from plain text to a web frontend. The frontend also talks to a special config script in the control section of a debian package, and it can talk to postinst scripts and other scripts as well, all using a special protocol. These scripts tell the frontend what values they need from the database, and the frontend asks the user questions to get those values if they aren’t set.”

So communicating with the debconf database was slowing the boot. Initiating the call, sending the data and receiving a response, was taking up to 4 seconds at a time and when there are many of these calls, they all soon add up.

After many a head-scratching moment it was decided that the best way to solve this would be to initiate the communication once and keep it open so that when debconf was needed, the overhead in setting it up was removed. The implementation details are all in the code history but the results are much easier to show.

Casper after

With a couple of other tweaks besides the debconf one, the boot is now down to 1 minute 53 seconds and casper takes just under 50 seconds of that. There is more room for improvement, pre-generating a default locale (although which locale that would be is a tough choice), pre-generating fonts and looking into SSL, but for now, this is a big win.

The bootcharts above are for the ARM based iMX51 device made by Freescale which is only just beginning to proliferate onto the market. Intel/AMD based machines show an equivalent speed-up.

Conclusion

So there you have it. The next time you boot into a Lucid live cd session it shouldn’t take quite so long, and now you know why.

I know what I want

I first thought that one of the new i7 CPU’s from Intel would be way to go but on careful consideration I found that the price for the chip itself is at a premium and a motherboard to support it is also expensive. I settled on a nice quad core instead.

Another thing on my wish list was lots of RAM. Again my initial assumptions were wrong. I thought either 6GB or 8GB would be the right way to go but after doing a lot of research online it seems that anything over 4GB isn’t really worth it unless you have a special use case, which I don’t. I settled on 4GB.

What I actually got

The full list of parts was:

Intel Core 2 Quad Q9400 2.66GHz (Retail 775)
ASRock G43Twins-FullHD 775 DDR3 Micro ATX Motherboard
Corsair 4GB TwinX DDR3 PC3-10600 1333Mhz Dual Channel DHX DDR3 (2x2GB)
1.5TB Samsung EcoGreen F2 SATA-2 Hard Drive
LG GGW-H20L Blu-ray Disc Rewriter & HD DVD ROM Retail Kit
Thermaltake TTM5 Midi Case
OCZ 400W StealthXStream Power Supply PSU

Bought later (see below)
Gainward nVidia 8400GS 256MB Fanless Graphics Card, TV/DVI/HDTV

So as you can see, the PC isn’t a screaming, bleeding edge computer but it is a great example of price vs performance. If you take out the Bluray burner which was an indulgence of mine, the above parts came in at just over £400. Not too bad for a very over-clockable quad core CPU, a good amount of RAM and hard drive space and a recent motherboard.

Problems

The only part of the list which I was a little concerned with was the motherboard. Traditionally motherboards can cause problems with Linux, especially new ones but my fears were seemingly unfounded as there were examples of it working fine. But it seems I was right to be concerned.

With the add-on graphics card that came with the board, Karmic wouldn’t even boot to the installer Launchpad Bug:429908. Jaunty would install but gave a lot of problems with the X server. The on-board graphics worked with Jaunty but performed terribly so my only answer was to purchase another graphics card. Fortunately the Geforce 8400GS was less that £25 delivered and works flawlessly with the Nvidia proprietary drivers.

Conclusion

So I now have a fast PC running Jaunty. I really want to upgrade it to Karmic but my experience with Karmic isn’t great at the moment. Alpha 4 on my laptop ran great but a ‘sudo apt-get upgrade’ a couple of days ago resulted in a non-booting machine. I suspect its something to do with the change to upstart that Karmic is doing at the moment but I’m not sure. I’ve also had a lot of trouble initially trying to installing Karmic on the PC. Maybe now the Geforce 8400GS is there instead of the add-on card it will work but I can’t afford to risk it yet.

All in all I’m happy with the machine. Bluray movies work (although I have to rip them under a Windows XP virtual machine) and the speed is great, I’ve even tried some overclocking; I’ve had it at 3.2GHz stable.

Now if only I could get Karmic working.

Update

I bit the bullet and did an “update-manager -d“. Everything is working as far as I can see, yeah!