Today is a last day of Ubuntu Developers Summit. I plan to attend few sessions, on evening maybe go to Brussels for some shopping (UDS is in a middle of nowhere) and tomorrow I hope to fly home.
So far I attended several sessions, some were too Ubuntu specific for me to get idea what it is about (PPA or other Launchpad related services for example) but in general time is not wasted.
Monday
Missed keynote ;( I blame Belgium train company for it. But I fetched it from YouTube so will watch it during return travel. Then Ubuntu on ARM project had private meeting where we had a chance to connect faces to names and got some short introduction. That was all for me — after lunch^Wbreakfast I got to sleep. During dinner time I met some fellows from old time: Rob Taylor, Neil Patel, Peter Goodall and spoke with several other guys.
Tuesday
ARM talk about toolchain was great. GCC 4.5 is what we want for our project I think. There was also warning that switching to 4.6 version will probably require transition process. Then I was on AEL/ALIP talk — should attend SoC:Dove talk instead. Session about building root filesystem images was started by me and then lead by Luïc. There was some good ideas told, many tools were mentioned so I will have something to do in near time. Another talk about toolchain and then Device Tree overview — what it is and why we want it.
Wednesday
Another sessions related to development tools for attending, one about U-Boot features and performance and three about building ARM archives. Kiko’s introduction to ARM was interesting presentation.
Day finished in Waterloo where we had a dinner with ARM Ltd. people. Nice chats with good food and wine.
Thursday
Attended memory footprint talk, next was kernel version alignment where people from ARM vendors gave us informations about their work on getting support for products in mainline kernel. Looks like 2.6.35 will be used in Maverick release.
Later was marketing talk about Freescale i.mx51/53/508 cpu family plus mentioning of Cortex-A9 based i.mx61/63 chips which will be released next year. Rob Herring mentioned that there may be BeagleBoard like device with i.mx53 processor available.
Zack from Debian told about cooperation between Debian and Ubuntu developers from Debian perspective. It was nice talk. Next was about plumbering and explained how HAL got removed, how other components changed in base of base system. Looks like upstart developers know what they do and where they are going.
As a way to get something different I went to QA session about tracking performance on different architectures. Mostly it was about Phoronix test suite and how it can be adapted for ARM. Then went to cross compiler packages which was nice session.
Last session was SoC: OMAP3/4 talk made by Texas Instruments people. They had Blaze with them, shown Ubuntu Lucid on it and then booted to Poky Linux to show OpenGL/ES and video decoding capabilities. Playing 6 video streams on rotating cube was nice. Playing 1080p videos without any visible frame drops was another nice stuff. And there will be OMAP4 based PandaBoard developer board similar to BeagleBoard line. When it arrive was not announced.
After that I went to Brussels with TI people for some food and beer. Discussed on many things, I shared my suggestion on how to make PandaBoard really nice, we did few beers. It was good spent time.
Friday
First got to rootless building of root filesystem images, then was ‘mukluk’ soft bootloader which is yet-another-kexec-based-bootloader. A bit of NIH syndrome but can grow into something interesting and kexecboot got mentioned few times.