Marcin Juszkiewicz

During last days I spent some time in binutils, gcc, gdb, glibc, libffi repositories. All of them have GIT mirrors but most (if not all) are kept in CVS by default.

I used CVS in previous millenium just because I did not know good alternative. But I also know that move from it to other SCM can be painful.

But digging though commits because shortlog view is useless hurts… Exported patches need to be edited to drop all changes to many Changelog files. For libffi it is even better to grab patches from mailing list than from repository…

Life sucks, then you die^Whave to deal with CVS git repos.

When I bought Samsung Chromebook friend started “nbench” on it. So I did same on my conference laptop. None of devices won…

Idea of testing cpu power was sitting somewhere at back of my head and finally I decided to just run one simple command available on nearly every GNU/Linux based system: “openssl speed”. Sure, on some systems it will use hardware accelerators, on others (or not) some options enabled to get more speed (like ARM assembly version which is not enabled in Debian/Ubuntu systems). But it is something what anyone can run at home.

Table may be hard to decipher so I also give it as Google Docs. It also has few more devices listed and whole tables (one below is for 8192 size samples).

Devices in table are:

• my Intel Core i7-2600K desktop
• my Intel U7300 (ultra low voltage) conference laptop
• Exynos5 Dual powered Samsung ARM Chromebook
• Exynos4 Dual powered Tizen development platform (got rid of it today)
• i.mx515 powered Efika MX Smartbook
• Beaglebone with AM335x cpu
• Sheevaplug (as only armv5te device which can compare with other entries)

Devices were running different versions of OpenSSL under different systems. It is listed in Google Docs document.

Most interesting columns are U7300 and Exynos 5250 ones — 3 years old laptop which I bought for conferences compared to Chromebook. Looks like for next conferences/events I will rather go with Chromebook not UL30A. This will give me one or two hours of battery life less but it is much lighter device at same time. But have to test it first for few days to check is it comfortable enough for daily use.

Half year ago I got Tizen development platform device. Played a bit with it and then put in a drawer due to other things to do.

Today I looked again at Tizen. Nothing changed. Git repositories still scream “*@#$!$ *** you developers!” due to lack of any commits other than code drop bombs.

So if someone (from Europe) wants this device — be first to comment. Sending with DHL and you pay for posting.

Today I added some Chromebook related packages into my PPA. What is there?

• xserver-xorg-video-armsoc == accelerated Xorg video driver.
• chromium-mali-opengles == OpenGL ES support — works as long as you have ROOT-A partition with Chromium OS cause I mount it to get Mali library.
• libasound2 == ALSA packages with UCM profiles for Chromebook. Say “no more” to fried speakers.

No support from me as usual. I provide packages for just released Ubuntu “quantal” and for development version (“raring”).

Kernel will probably be next. There are instructions from Olof Johansson for it. Not hard task but requires some time. Also requires packaging of vboot tools (for signing kernels) and cgpt (for manipulating GPT).

Another part is touchpad snippet for X11:

Section "InputClass"
        Identifier "touchpad"
        MatchIsTouchpad "on"
EndSection

Any idea how to package it in friendly way? I thought about “meta-chromebook” package for such tweaks but it does not sound nice to me.

Video acceleration would be great. But this part is beyond me so far.

So, if you have Ubuntu running on your Chromebook (nevermind is it on internal storage or side SD or USB stick) as long as it is at least “quantal” go and grab my packages. They will make use of device much more pleasant. Share any tweaks and tips in comments.

UPDATE: There is a new project related to Chromebook support in distributions. More about it in my blog post about it.

Lot of services followed article on EETimes where it was announced that Samsung will present 8-core ARM cpu. What was skipped on some of them is that this is big.LITTLE design so it is made as 4xCortex-A7 + 4xCortex-A15 setup.

Good to know that there will be silicon from other vendors than ARM Ltd. Current development platform is Versatile Express TC2 (Test Chip 2) which shows that amount of A7 cores does not have to match A15 ones (it has 3xA7 + 2xA15).

But amount of cores is one thing. People usually complain about battery life and guess that such setup will suck power like crazy… when it is especially designed to save power.

Take a look at current “war” at mobile market. 2 years ago single core 1GHz Cortex-A8 cpu wit 512MB ram was high end. Then we got dual core cpu (usually Cortex-A9 based like Exynos4, OMAP4, Tegra2) and 512-1024MB of memory. Battery usually had similar capacity and lived similar time. During 2012 we saw move to quad core processors in mobile devices (Exynos4412, Tegra3) with 1-2GB ram. Space for battery was same or smaller. Next year will bring Cortex-A15 cpu (Exynos5, OMAP5, Tegra4) but this eats power…

So phones will probably get big.LITTLE processors to give users with lot of cpu power when needed and battery life otherwise. Cortex-A5/8/9/15 will not disappear from market — will land in normal and cheap devices.

I have dual core Cortex-A15 netbook now (Chromebook) and it works fast. Who knows, maybe in 2014 I will be able to replace it with something powered by 4xA7 + 4xA15 processor (unless ARMv8 will land at same time). And there is a work on getting ALL of cores running at same time…

As you know I am responsible for building cross compilers for Ubuntu. They targeted “armel” and “armhf”. But this will change.

During last few weeks I was slowly updating cross compiler source packages for ‘raring’ (current Ubuntu development version). Most of time was taken by conferences so it had to wait until previous week when I got first two parts (binutils/cross and arm{el,hf,64}-cross-toolchain-base) working. I found some issues in binutils, eglibc, linux, gcc-4.7 but make workarounds for them — will report bugs and work on fixes of course.

But situation is not nice. Armel was dropped from ‘raring’ which made building a bit harder (had to find a way to get “linux-libc-dev” package from “linux-source-3.7.0”). But I am more and more convinced that I should just drop “armel” cross compiler. It will make my life easier but of course patches are welcome.

Multilib support will get dropped as well. “armhf” cross compiler will not build for “armel” cause there will be no eglibc packages.

But there will be a bonus — I work also on “arm64” cross compiler.

People told me many times that I complain a lot (maybe even too much sometimes). But this is who I am and you have to live with it.

When I get new device I usually blog about it — like I told during recent conferences: “give me a device and I will find something to complain about, but also will usually tell something positive as well”. Sometimes those posts even got presented by other people at management meetings as an example of what is good/wrong in described products.

But so far I never got an email with ask to remove any blog post — there were comments outside of blog sometimes but never request to take my opinion down. I edited two posts — first one was before publication because I sent it for review (it was not requested by company), second time when I got some information about product in public space but device had to be announced week later at big event during one of trade shows.

What do you think? Should I write more about devices or rather not?

Week ago I got message that someone higher in chain decided that Canonical will not get me this year. Took me few days to get it fully confirmed so I can now write about it.

So for another few months I will stay at Linaro. What will be after that time? Will see — Linaro got new members, there is enterprise group now so many interesting things can happen.