Linux on ARM

Summary: Chromebooks are now on sale in more places around the world than ever. In part, that may be because Google's high-end Chromebook Pixel has a very well-known and enthusiastic fan: Linux's inventor, Linus Torvalds.

Announced at NVIDIA's GPU Technology Conference (GTC) 2013 event today was the "Kayla" ARM development board.
 

Amit Kucheria is the Linaro Power Management Tech Lead, and Will Deacon works on the Linux Kernel at ARM. They talk about what they have been doing at Linaro Connect and what they are working on in the months to come.

I'm a huge fan of Raspberry Pi, the super-affordable ARM GNU/Linux computer that's bringing programming back into schools (and beyond). In one year alone, more than a million Pis have been sold globally, which is a phenomenal achievement, and demand for the uncased credit card-sized device shows no signs of abating.

Debian developer working at Collabora. Contributing to the open and free software community. On the board of directors of the Gnome desktop, doing Gstreamer and multimedia work, making multimedia work on set-top-boxes and smart TVs, working on the automobile environment. Building the ARM ports in Debian, optimizing the hard float in Debian, Ubuntu, now everyone is using the ARM hard float.

Last month I delivered extensive benchmarks of Ubuntu Linux on the Google Nexus 10 using the recently released Ubuntu Touch Developer Preview. In that article were benchmarks from the Samsung Exynos 5 Dual (Cortex-A15) tablet against a range of ARM Cortex and Intel/AMD x86 systems.

Developers from the member companies involved with Linaro are planning continued improvements to the LLVM compiler infrastructure that will benefit ARM developers and customers. With this ARM LLVM work there should also be Gallium3D LLVMpipe enhancements.

The 2D graphics acceleration support for NVIDIA Tegra 2 and Tegra 3 ARM SoCs is still maturing and going through code revisions before entering the mainline Linux kernel, hopefully for Linux 3.10.

The first working ARM System-on-Chip (SoC) GPU graphics driver built for Gallium3D has been merged into mainline Mesa! The driver that was merged into mainline Mesa is the Gallium3D Freedreno for Qualcomm Snapdragon/Adreno graphics hardware. This Freedreno Gallium3D driver initially supports the A220, which is the GPU that Qualcomm uses with its Snapdragon S3 SoC.

Jon Masters runs Red Hat's ARM team, and contributes to the Fedora ARM group also. Red Hat works as a part of the Linaro Enterprise Group, to work on the first generation of ARM Servers.