Good things have one ugly part in common — they have to end one day… For me that day will be 31st May 2013 when contract between Canonical and Linaro will end.
Those 3 years were great. I wrote a lot about it half year ago so those of you who are new - go to my previous “good bye Linaro” post before reading rest of this post.
Half year ago I was going to Canonical but got hold at Linaro for longer. Then I made a mistake by agreeing to postpone my move to Linaro instead of joining as soon as possible — my fault…
Last 6 months were full of interesting things. We went from just bootstrapped AArch64 port to fully working LAMP and SDK images built with OpenEmbedded. I integrated all Linaro layers into one repository and reorganized in a way that those who want only our toolchains can have them without using any of our changes. This move was greeted by lot of maintainers and users from OpenEmbedded community. Wherever new toolchain components were provided for tests I had them checked on first day to see how AArch64 situation got improved and provided fixes when they were needed.
Recent release of Yocto Project has several changes done by me and Riku Voipio integrated. OpenEmbedded project also made release and has even more our changes in it. Most of those were AArch64 related, some were software updates or fixes to low level stuff.
Linaro Enterprise Group has Owen Yamauchi from Facebook working on porting HipHopVM. He is using SDK created by OpenEmbedded to not worry about any build dependencies or missing libraries. With my work (and work from porters like Riku Voipio, Steve McIntyre, Yvan Roux and others) he got not only libraries but also tools he needed for his job.
Andy Johnson started OpenJDK porting — also with OpenEmbedded. Riku provided instructions which I merged into our ‘jenkins-setup’ scripts to make live easier for Andy.
Due to all that work I am often contacted by random people (not only from Linaro) wherever they have some AArch64 related questions. Sometimes even with ARMv4/EABI related like post from Nicolas Pitre a day after RMK wrote that FPU emulator has to be removed from the Linux kernel. I provided him instructions how to make such build and just to be sure that I did not made any mistakes I tried one on my machine. IIRC none of main distributions support EABI for ARMv4 (no thumb) processors.
But looks like all that has to end. Unless someone from Linaro member companies (or who knows, maybe even Linaro itself) wants to hire me. I am open for offers.
If I go outside of @linaro.org then I would like to stay around and check how things go — probably as ‘community member’ or how it is called.
And one more thing at the end. As usual when I end my work at one place I gather recommendations on LinkedIn. If you have few spare minutes and want to write something then it will be appreciated.