Linux on ARM

Orange Pi 2G-IoT was unveiled at the start of the year as an ultra cheap ($10) Linux development board with 2G cellular connectivity. The board has just launched for $9.90 + shipping on Aliexpress.

Everyday we can read stories about password database hacking, malware, ransomware, and so on, and companies can try to protect themselves by paying professionals that do a more or less good jobs, but individuals can’t afford professional service, so it is harder to protect oneself.

The first and only planned point release to Phoronix Test Suite 7.0-Ringsaker is now available as a minor update to this cross-platform, open-source benchmarking software. Coming three weeks after the big Phoronix Test Suite 7.0 release, Phoronix Test Suite 7.0.1 contains a few fixes and other minor enhancements to our long-standing open-source benchmarking framework.

Friends and fellows, we’re super glad to announce the outcome of a beautiful partnership with ARM University Program and Mouser: the Embedded Linux Education Kit. This is the ninth and latest Education Kit from ARM University and it’s beautiful to be part of such a great initiative.

LibreELEC developers announced the release and general availability of the first maintenance update to the major LibreELEC 8.0 stable series of the Linux-based operating system built around the Kodi open-source media center.

When he was growing up, a dream of Linux pioneer Linus Torvalds was to acquire the Acorn Archimedes, a groundbreaking personal computer with the first ARM RISC chips. But in 1987, Archimedes wasn't available to Torvalds in Finland, so he settled for the Sinclair QL. In the meanwhile, the Archimedes failed and disappeared from the scene, killing any chance for ARM chips to dominate PCs.

Sysadmin blog Microsoft now runs a bunch of Windows servers on ARM processors. Apparently, these ARM chips are quite good at their jobs and Microsoft might try converting entire categories of workloads over. All around the world the tech press has speculated on whether or not Windows on ARM will be showing up in on-premises datacenters. In doing so, they've completely missed the point.

For some weekend benchmarking fun, I compared the Jetson TX2 that NVIDIA released this weekend with their ARM 64-bit "Denver 2" CPU cores paired with four Cortex-A57 cores to various other ARM single board computers I have access to. This is looking at the CPU performance in different benchmarks ranging from cheap ~$10 ARM SBCs to the Raspberry Pi to the Jetson TX1 and Jetson TX2.

The maker of Orange Pi boards, Shenzhen Xunlong Software, has partnered with Canonical to launch Orange Pi app store, allowing developers to gain a simple mechanism to share their applications, projects and scripts with the Orange Pi community.

The development team behind the BSD-based NetBSD free operating system were proud to announce the official and general availability of the NetBSD 7.1 release.

Leon ANAVI may be a full-time software engineer, but in his spare time he has started to develop open source hardware project with the help of others and by himself. Last year, I got hold of his RabbitMax Flex HAT for Raspberry Pi, and tested it with the provided LCD display, one temperature sensor, and a Raspberry Pi 2 board.

Microsoft's .NET Core is now making its way to Raspberry Pi developer boards, and an official .NET 2.0 Core is coming from the software company later this year. The .NET Core for Raspberry Pi and instructions to install it are available on the Github site.

We’ve already covered LicheePi One board powered by Allwinner A13 processor, but it was not for sale out of China, and the developers are now back with LicheePi Zero board/module, slightly bigger than a micro SD card, featuring Allwinner V3s processor, and offered for as low as $6, or $8 with WiFi via an Indiegogo campaign.

The Q4OS development team is pleased to inform Softpedia today about the general availability of a brand-new edition of their Debian-based GNU/Linux distribution for PINE64 boards.

We’ve already seen Neil Armstrong, part of BayLibre, worked on adding Amlogic SoC (S905/S905X/S912) to mainline Linux via our virtual schedule for the Embedded Linux Conference & OpenIoT Summit 2017. But at the time, although we could see some activity in Linux 4.10 including support for Nexbox A95X and Nexbox A1, they did provide that much details the work that had been done, but since then, ELC 2017 videos have been released, and BayLibre wrote a short post about 3D Graphics support in mainline Linux.