Linaro group advances Linux on ARM with 10.11 release (ars technica)

[Posted November 12, 2010 by ris]

Ars technica takes a look at the latest Linaro release. "Linaro, a nonprofit organization that aims to accelerate embedded Linux development for the ARM architecture, has announced its first software release. Version 10.11 of the group's software stack quietly debuted this week. The group appears to be attracting interest and making steady progress."

Linaro group advances Linux on ARM with 11.10 release (ars technica)

Posted Nov 12, 2010 20:59 UTC (Fri) by robertwall (guest, #64484) [Link] (1 responses)

Version 10.11, actually. We're not in the future yet ;)

(Based on the URL, I'm guessing Ars got it wrong in their article originally and then fixed it.)

Linaro group advances Linux on ARM with 11.10 release (ars technica)

Posted Nov 13, 2010 1:43 UTC (Sat) by ris (subscriber, #5) [Link]

> Version 10.11, actually. We're not in the future yet ;)

I did wonder about that. It's fixed here now.

Linaro group advances Linux on ARM with 11.10 release (ars technica)

Posted Nov 12, 2010 23:33 UTC (Fri) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link] (2 responses)

I wonder why Linaro has no GCC 4.6 branch yet (just 4.4/4.5). Surely for upstream inclusion they would be more successful working on GCC 4.6 (next stable branch, currently open for general bugfixes)? According to the GCC website, GCC 4.3-4.5 are open for regression fixes and docs only.

Linaro group advances Linux on ARM with 11.10 release (ars technica)

Posted Nov 16, 2010 13:39 UTC (Tue) by arnd (subscriber, #8866) [Link] (1 responses)

The whole point of a binary distribution is to have something that is well tested, which does not work well while in stage 1 of the development cycle.

The contents of the 4.4 and 4.5 Linaro compilers are essentially the same patches that went into 4.6 as ARM specific enhancements and fixes for those users that want to benefit from the latest work on a more stable basis.

Since the backend work normally gets done on upstream first, just downloading the upstream 4.6 snapshots will get you all the features that the Linaro toolchain team has developed. I assume that there will be 4.6 linaro builds with feature backports as soon as new work gets merged into the 4.7 branch next year.

Linaro group advances Linux on ARM with 11.10 release (ars technica)

Posted Dec 4, 2010 3:08 UTC (Sat) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

Hmm, sounds to me like GCC's stable branch policies need to be updated so those fixes can be added to them.

Linaro group advances Linux on ARM with 11.10 release (ars technica)

Posted Nov 13, 2010 1:50 UTC (Sat) by robert_s (subscriber, #42402) [Link] (2 responses)

As much as they hope and pray, ARM is still not going to become a real general purpose computing platform until graphics drivers exist for _any_ of the SoCs common GPUs. This would preferably take the form of Gallium drivers as it would (ultimately) get them support for the most features/APIs with the least amount of contributed code required.

ARM are really shooting themselves in the foot here by keeping their Mali documentation secret. But Imagination Technologies and Qualcomm both also have the power to make a real difference here.

Linaro group advances Linux on ARM with 11.10 release (ars technica)

Posted Nov 13, 2010 5:47 UTC (Sat) by rahvin (guest, #16953) [Link] (1 responses)

I agree with you, but I also believe ARM developers will never FOSS their graphics drivers and as a result as you say they will never see widespread success. The best part is it will be blamed on lack of x86, not that they have a severely broken software stack because of proprietary graphics drivers and it's difficult to impossible for developers to utilize the platform to it's fullest with closed drivers resulting in software that is half as good as open access platforms.

Linaro group advances Linux on ARM with 11.10 release (ars technica)

Posted Nov 15, 2010 22:36 UTC (Mon) by bangert (subscriber, #28342) [Link]

its strange to see how differently the arm and x86 teams (apparently) are working. Intel is pushing hardware support to the kernel many months before the hardware is actually released. many arm drivers are never even proposed for mainline -- nokia being the obvious exception.

given these differences, it may not be unlikely for x86 to enter the mobile phone business afterall...