Wow it's that time again; our 4th release of Ubuntu on ARM is upon us. In the past we have provided a Freescale iMX51 image, a Marvell Dove image and a TI OMAP 3 image for Beagle Boards. This cycle we will be releasing images for Marvell dove and Texas Instruments (TI) OMAP series of processors both OMAP 3 and OMAP 4. Until now we have always provided a "live image" just like the X86 CD's,that is you could test Ubuntu and then choose to install it to your storage media. Well for the OMAP series of development boards this did not make sense so we have introduced a pre-installed image format that we are using for the OMAP family, slap it on an SD/MicroSD card, and boot it, it will ask you some questions, resize itself to use the entire card and you are off and running.
As always we are releasing the full archive compiled for ARMv7 both main and universe with more than 15,000 application and library packages. The full Ubuntu distro, not some cut down 200 or 300 hundred packages only. That would be packages for Ubuntu Desktop, Netbook, and Server, everything! For ARM on the netbook side we have both a 2D Enlightenment Foundations Libraries (EFL) netbook launcher and now a 3D Unity based netbook launcher for ARM. We created the EFL netbook launcher for ARM because it was lighter weight than the same interface in Gnome. Faster for unaccelerated frame buffers to load and scroll. The 3D will need more testing, it's the first time we have brought it out for ARM but we are getting there.
For those of you who know/care about such things, the entire archive has been compiled with ARMv7 THUMB2 little endian options using Linaro's gcc 4.4.4 branch which has some additional optimizations to improve performance and reduce code size. You can find more about the Linaro tools work and download the tools for yourself here. We used little endian options and discovered some packages did not work well compiled that way, so for those we re-compiled them as ARMv7 ARM little endian code. Lots of work, lots of packages. If you discover a package that does not work as you expect, file a bug on launchpad, we will look into it, it's possible with all of the packages in Ubuntu we missed a couple that need to be compiled as ARM code only. Of course there are some packages that just don't make sense on ARM (memtest86 and other packages like that come to mind), but if it's not really specific to X86 then you should find it compiled for Ubuntu on ARM.
For me another exciting thing is that we worked closely with TI engineers and there will be accelerated video drivers available for OMAP processors. You'll have to grab them from an Ubuntu PPA but they will be available. On top of that ARM announced a new processor for the ARMv7 family the Cortex-A15, which gives us access to more memory (up to 1 Terabyte) and most importantly a hypervisor in the hardware, can you say virtualisation here we come!
Overall Ubuntu will be ensuring that regardless of architecture you can expect an excellent feature set and high quality.
Finally my pet peeve: Hardware availability, or the lack there of, for two years when asked where can I get this kind of hardware I've been forced to say you can't but you'll be able to get it "real soon now".
Well last cycle that finally started to change, the Freescale Babbage board could be purchased on their web site, but it was not inexpensive, certainly out of my impulse purchase hacking price, otherwise known as the spouse test. This cycle it's really changed, you can get OMAP 3 Beagle and Beagle xM and soon OMAP 4 Panda boards at what I consider just within the impulse purchase hacking price, which for me is sub $200 USD, your mileage may differ ;-P
Some interesting reading:Cortex-A8 Technical Reference Manual:Thumb-2 architectureInstruction Set ArchitecturesCortex-A8 ProcessorCortex-A9 ProcessorCortex-A15 ProcessorARM Architecture, WikipediaUbuntu wiki: ARM Thumb-2PandaBoardBeagleBoardBeagleBoard-xMFreescale i.MX51 Evaluation Kit
Guest Partner Blogger:David Mandala, Engineering Manager, Ubuntu on ARM, David works for Canonical as the Engineering Team Manager responsible for producing the ARM flavour of the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution. He has been involved in Linux since 1994 and has been working in the embedded space for more then 30 years, starting as a hardware engineer and software developer.