Hot on the heels of our first cadence week, I wanted to take the opportunity to collect feedback about the tools we as a community utilize. Specifically the QATracker which we heavily rely on for managing our work, testcases and results. From the wiki, "The QATracker is the master repository for all our our testing within ubuntu QA. It holds our testcases, records our results, and helps coordinate our testing events."

This is a link to a brief survey asking a few simple questions about how you've used the tool. All your responses are anonymous, but I will publish the aggregate question information and share it with the community once completed. The goal is to help ensure the tool is meeting our needs and is being utilized.

I'll leave the survey up until June 24th. My hope is to encourage more folks to help test as well as make it more enjoyable for those already taking part. I want to ensure our tools and processes continue to evolve, strengthen and become more robust for everyone as we continue on our mission. Part of that is making sure the tools we use are enjoyable!

Thanks in advance everyone!

As a bonus, Pasi, aka knome, has put together some mockups on how we might be able to switch what the results page looks like. This is perhaps the most utilized page of the site, so without further ado, here's a mockup of some changes proposed to make it more usable:

Old Site
New Site Mockup

This week I am pleased to announce two Q&A sessions to get all your juicy Ubuntu-related questions answered:

• Wed 19th June – taking place an hour earlier this week at 6pm UTC will be my usual weekly Q&A session where you are welcome to bring any and all questions! Be sure to join me, it is always a lot of fun.
• Thu 20th June – taking place at 7pm UTC and kicking off the first in a series of 1-on-1 interviews that I am going to do, I will be interviewing Martin Albisetti who is a member of the team making application submissions for Ubuntu on desktops, phones, tablets, and TVs easier than ever. Martin’s team is building the server that will recieve submissions as click packages and review them before they go out to users. Martin is also an active member of the community and a member of the Community Council. I will be asking Martin some questions about his work and then we will open it up for you folks to ask questions too.

You can access both of these sessions on Ubuntu On Air.

We are working on a powerful vision with Ubuntu; to build a convergent Operating System that runs on phones, tablets, desktops, and TVs. A core part of this vision is that this is a platform and ecosystem that you can influence, improve, and be a part of, significantly more-so than our competitors.

One consistent piece of feedback we have seen from carriers and handset manufacturers is a a greater desire for platform competition and participation on helping to shape and define the ecosystem. A key goal for Ubuntu is to satisfy these needs.

Today we launched the the Ubuntu Carrier Advisory Group (CAG) which includes Deutsche Telekom, Everything Everywhere, Telecom Italia, Korea Telecom, LG UPlus, Portugal Telecom, and SK Telecom as founding members. Wide industry participation in the group will help us to prioritize the delivery of new Ubuntu features, and grow an ecosystem of software, services and devices that meets that need.

The CAG provides regular meetings that take place regularly and typically include a briefing by Canonical or a partner company, followed by feedback from carriers. Members can bring domain specialists to calls for each relevant topic covered. Topics planned for discussion in the CAG forum include:

• Differentiation for OEMs and operators.
• Developer ecosystems and application portability.
• HTML5 standards, performance and compatibility.
• Marketplaces for apps, content and services.
• Revenue share models for publishers, operators, and OEMs.
• Payment mechanisms and standards.
• Platform fragmentation.
• Consumer and enterprise market segments and positioning.

CAG members can also launch Ubuntu devices before non-members in local markets. The first two launch partners will be selected from within the group, with the next wave following six months later; non-members will face a substantial wait to gain access to the platform. Members will have early knowledge of silicon, as well as OEM and ODM partners involved in the Ubuntu mobile initiative.

The Carrier Advisory Group is chaired independently of Canonical by David Wood, who has 25 years’ experience in the mobile industry, including leadership roles at Psion, Symbian and Accenture. He has wide experience with collaborative advisory groups, and twice served on the board of directors of the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA).

David has this to say about the CAG:

“The mobile industry still needs an independent platform that enables innovation and differentiation. That platform is Ubuntu. The Carrier Advisory Group will have the opportunity to influence the Ubuntu roadmap, and take full advantage of the potential this emerging platform.”

If you are a carrier interested in helping shape Ubuntu’s mobile strategy and being part of the CAG, click here.

Last week I had a neat idea. Well, at least I think it is a neat idea. Let me share it with you folks to get your take.

We have been spending a lot of time refining every aspect of the application development process for writing Ubuntu phone/tablet/desktop applications. This has included:

• Building a simple, and powerful Ubuntu SDK.
• Building a comprehensive knowledge base on developer.ubuntu.com for getting started writing your first app, and performing common programming tasks.
• Integrating source control, bug tracking, and more from Launchpad into the SDK.
• Providing a safe and secure, sand-boxed environment to run apps in, and an automated process for reviewing how these apps come into Ubuntu and are exposed to Ubuntu users.

This is all part of an end-to-end process to make writing apps for Ubuntu fun, simple, and intuitive from the minute you load the SDK to the minute your app appears on a users phone, tablet, or desktop.

Project Websites

One piece we haven’t looked into is how app developers can set up a website for their app.

App websites vary tremendously in size and complexity. Some people just want a single static web page with details of the app and how to get it. Some want a more complex site with integrated forums, bug tracking, and more.

As part of what we can offer with Ubuntu, we should be able to bundle all aspects of your infrastructure too. Need a website? Check. Need a forum? Check. Need a bug tracker? Check.

Fortunately we have a powerful cloud orchestration tool in Juju that can not only simplify the deployment, management, and scaling of the service, but could potentially take virtually all of the pain out of getting the site set up in the first place, and then scale up where needed.

The Idea

Let’s assume I have just published my first version of my app in Ubuntu. I now need a simple website to get my app on the web and known to users. While I want to start simple, there is a possibility though that my project may become hugely popular making me a king among men and require a larger, more expansive web presence.

Let’s start simple though. Ideally, I want to be able to specify some configuration detail like this in a file:

app:
   app-name: Read All About It
   download-archive-name: readallaboutit
   launchpad-project: readallaboutit
website:
   website-strapline: All the headlines in your hand.
   screenshots: ['http://www.myscreenshotonline.com/screen1.jpg',
     'http://www.myscreenshotonline.com/screen1.jpg']
   page-about: True
   page-developers: True
   page-screenshots: True
   page-contact: False

…and then do this:

juju deploy --config myconfig.yaml ubuntu-app-website

The charm would read in the configuration file and generate a set of static web pages based on that configuration.

As an example, it would pre-populate chunks of the page, and generate developer information on the Developer page with details of the main branch, bug tracking, a form to submit a bug, and more (we can pull this from the Launchpad project).

It could look simple like this:

This would mean an app developer could spin-up a super light-weight app website with just a configuration file and Juju on whichever cloud service they prefer. This would be light-weight both in terms of getting up and running and resource usage; you could set this up on a tiny cloud instance. As ever, if my project was to get slashdotted I could scale up the service, as with any other Juju charm.

Now let’s assume I want to add more functionality to my website. This is where the real power of Juju could come in. Let’s assume I want a forum. I should be able to run:

juju deploy ubuntu-app-website-forum
juju relate ubuntu-app-website ubuntu-app-website-forum

This would then spin up a forum (or Discourse site) but the charm would integrate it into the existing website with a navigation link and shared theming. It could then look like this:

We could then conceivably have any number of supported additions (e.g. mailing lists, video streams, event organization, tutorial content, API docs etc) for the website that app maintainers can use to easily expand their service as they see fit.

Next Steps

I shared this idea with Jorge who thought it was a neat idea. He then talked with Marco who has been putting together a first cut that we can experiment with. If anyone is interested in helping to build this, please let me know in the comments.

Ever since we first announced Ubuntu for phones on January 2nd this year, a fantastic relationship with our friends in the XDA community has formed. For quite some time now we have been releasing daily images of Ubuntu for phones/tablets and our friends in the XDA community have been working to enable these images for a wide range of devices.

Much of this work has been happening on the Ubuntu Touch XDA forums which have seen 4600+ posts from this enthusiastic community.

I wanted to follow up on a few different XDA-related things that are going on.

Participating in and Sponsoring xda:devcon

From 8-11 August in Miami, Florida will be xda:devcon, the very first XDA developer conference. We are sponsoring the event and will be exhibiting there. We are delighted to be supporting such an awesome event.

I will also be speaking at the event and delivering a new presentation called Building a Convergent Future With Ubuntu that will cover the vision and goals of Ubuntu on devices, how our community is right at the core of what we are doing (and accessible to everyone), and how far along we are in this vision.

Michael Hall will be running an app development workshop and showing attendees how to build an application from scratch that runs across Ubuntu phones, tablets, and desktops. More details on Michael’s workshop will be announced soon. Given that we are releasing the beta of our Ubuntu SDK in July, this workshop will be a great opportunity to come and learn how to get started!

We will also be joining the main conference and happy to answer questions, demo Ubuntu on these different devices, and anything else. If you want to set up a meeting, please drop me an email.

Weekly XDA Q&A

We want to ensure our friends in the XDA community have as much information at their fingertips about Ubuntu Touch. As such, Daniel Holbach is collating questions from the community (you can ask your question here) and then posting a weekly summary of questions on this XDA forum thread.

As ever, if anyone has any other questions, be sure to join my weekly live Ubuntu Q&A videocast. This week it will be happening at 6pm UTC on Wednesday 19th June on Ubuntu On Air. Be sure to join me then!

Making Porting Easier

One of the reasons I am so delighted to see the close relationship between Ubuntu and XDA continuing to form is that I feel making Ubuntu available on a range of different devices is a key part of what will help us to be successful.

Although we at Canonical a are currently targetting a very specific set of handsets for our first release of Ubuntu Touch (Galaxy Nexus and Nexus 4), the wider XDA community has been working to enable the image on other devices that Canonical is not directly focused on. This is an awesome contribution.

One of the technical challenges here is how we handle firmware and binary blobs to make various hardware components work. Unfortunately, some of this firmware cannot be legally re-distributed by us (although the user can typically download it directly).

I have asked Daniel Holbach to work with the phonedations team to ease this process as much as possible and some work is going into phablet-flash to make it easier to handle these firmware pieces. We should have more on this in the coming weeks.

Onwards and Upwards!

There is lots of fantastic work going on and I am looking forward to continuing to work with the always excellent and approachable XDA community. We look forward to seeing you in Miami in August!

Filming Fast & Furious 7…

Note: The car is what we call a Combi in Peru, which is a form of public transportation. While I didn’t create the FF7 original pic, it is mock to peruvian combi drivers because those are one of the most reckless drivers in the world.

The Ubuntu community is a core part of what makes us what we are, and right at the center of that are our Ubuntu Members. Ubuntu Members provide significant and sustained contributions over a wide range of areas such as packaging, documentation, programming, translations, advocacy, support, and more. We always want to do our best to recognize and appreciate our many members in the Ubuntu family, across these many different teams and our flavors.

We are pleased to announce a new benefit for new Ubuntu Members. When you become approved as an official Ubuntu Member, you will be mailed a printed certificate signed by Mark Shuttleworth, founder of the Ubuntu project to recognize your membership. We hope you put it up on your wall where you contribute to Ubuntu and bring freedom and openness to technology.

To find out more, and find out how to get yoru certificate, see this post on the fridge.

In recent months we have been seeing tremendous growth and interest in the Ubuntu SDK that is at the heart of building applications for Ubuntu for phones, tablets, desktops, and TVs. The SDK provides the ability to build rich native applications in QML/Qt that hook right into the system, platform services, messaging, social media and more. We will also be providing support for HTML5 apps soon (with deep platform integration), and for OpenGL apps too.

Today you can download the SDK and follow a getting started tutorial to write your app. If you have Ubuntu running on a phone/tablet (find out how to install the daily images here), you can test and run the application the device with just a click. The entire experience is all encased within our SDK IDE. We are still refining and improving many aspects of the SDK, and our Beta release will be in July.

When most developers are learning a new platform or technology, you have lots of questions. How do I do X? How do I do Y? While we can get our new developers up and running quickly with the SDK and tutorial, we also want to help provide as many answers to these common questions too. This is where the new cookbook comes in.

The App Developer Cookbook

Today we are introducing the Ubuntu App Developers Cookbook on developer.ubuntu.com. The cookbook provides a number of different pages (e.g Device Sensors, Files and Storage, Games, General App Development, Multimedia, Networking etc) with a list of common questions and their associated answers.

Instead of building an entirely new piece of infrastructure, we wanted to work with the place where our developers naturally ask their questions; AskUbuntu, the Ubuntu themed StackExchange site we use for all our Q+A needs across the Ubuntu community.

Here’s how it works: when you have a question, simply browse the cookbook to find an answer for your query. If you don’t, simply ask that question on AskUbuntu, and when a question has received two up-votes and an accepted answer, it will be added to the cookbook. This will ensure the very best content appears on the cookbook for current and new Ubuntu developers to enjoy.

What you see today is a first iteration of the cookbook. In the next few weeks we will be making some additional improvements:

• Refining the questions listed in the cookbook.
• Enhancing the navigation of the cookbook pages.
• Adding sub-sections to make content easier to navigate.
• Having a different cookbooks for Native (QML/Qt apps), HTML5, OpenGL, and Scopes.

If you have any questions or queries about the cookbook, feel free to share in the comments!

How To Help

One of the core foundational strengths of Ubuntu is our community, and we are looking for help in ensuring our cookbook is as capable and comprehensive as possible. As such, we would like to encourage our community to do the following:

• Be sure to ask questions on AskUbuntu for topics not covered by the cookbook.
• When you ask a question, be sure to accept the answer when it answers the question otherwise it won’t be accepted into the cookbook.
• Be sure to upvote questions that you find useful.

Thanks for continuing to help make the Ubuntu App Dev community a fun, dynamic, and innovative place to be!

Following up on the discussion opened up by Colin Watson on ubuntu-devel and further discussions at vUDS, we’ve created a public mailing list to continue exploring and coordinating all the work around the new packaging format and changes needed to the surrounding systems.

You can sign up joining this Launchpad team: https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-appstore-developers

Since we didn’t want to block on having everything cleaned up, some documents thrown in the mailing list may not be publicly visible. Apologies in advance while we slowly move them over to be accessible by everyone. We’ve decided to take a pragmatic approach here instead of blocking until everything was perfect so the discussions could all happen in public.

With a rebel yell: “more, more, more”
More, more, more.

Rebel Yell, Billy Idol

This weekend the LibreOffice community will meet again in Hamburg for the third Hackfest at this location:

here is how it looked last year:

Hackers on the last Hamburg Hackfest

Like last year, this years Hackfest gets kicked off with a meet and greet at the Schachcafe on Friday 20:00 o’clock local time. Think of it like the “beer event” at FOSDEM, which helps everyone warm up for the event –  except it will not be February and not freezing cold. Looking this picture, it likely wont be much like cold FOSDEM at all:

All details can be found on the Hackfest 2013 wiki page. Thanks to Lanedo for sponsoring this event and also big thanks to Attraktor.org for hosting us again!

I released umockdev 0.2.6. Most importantly, this now fully works on ARM platforms, as we want to use it to write tests for/on the Ubuntu phone. I tested it on my Nexus 7, and the tests also succeed on the ARM Ubuntu builder (which are Panda boards). Fixing this revealed some interesting issues in recorded ioctl traces (as they are platform specific in some cases due to different word length) as well as kernel bugs in the Tegra drivers.

This version also fixes compatibility with older automake versions again, so that the daily builds for raring should work again.

I also have a new gvfs test case ready to commit which uses umockdev (if available) to test functionality of the gphoto backend. But that needs the new UMockdevTestbed.clear() API in 0.2.6, so I was holding that back. I will land it soon in upstream git now.

Oh boy. June stormed in and the May installment is late! Not much changed at the top. The Northern Hemisphere spring storms keep Stormcloud at the top with Fluendo DVD staying put at the number two spot. Steam continues its top of the chart spree on the Free Top 10.

Want to develop for the new Phone and Tablet OS, Ubuntu Touch? Be sure to check out the “Go Mobile” site for details.

Top 10 paid apps

1. Stormcloud
2. Fluendo DVD Player
3. Filebot
4. Quick ‘n Easy Web Builder
5. MC-Launcher
6. Mini Minecraft Launcher
7. Braid
8. UberWriter
9. Drawers
10. Bastion

Top 10 free apps

1. Steam
2. Motorbike
3. Master PDF Editor
4. Youtube to MP3
5. Screencloud
6. Nitro
7. Splashtop Remote Desktop App for Linux
8. CrossOver (Trial)
9. Plex Media Server
10. IntelliJ IDEA 12 Community Edition

Would you like to see your app featured in this list and on millions of user’s computers? It’s a lot easier than you think:

• If you’re just getting your feet wet, check out how to get started with your first app in Ubuntu ›
• If you have an existing app you’d like to deliver to the world, submit it to the Ubuntu Software Center ›

Notes:

• The lists of top 10 app downloads includes only those applications submitted through My Apps on the Ubuntu App Developer Site. For more information about of usage of other applications in the Ubuntu archive, check out the Ubuntu Popularity Contest statistics.
• The top 10 free apps list contains gratis applications that are distributed under different types of licenses, some of which may not be open source. For detailed license information, please check each application’s description in the Ubuntu Software Center.

Follow Ubuntu App Development on:

Social Media Icons by Paul Robert Lloyd

You can now start translating Ubuntu Saucy on Launchpad.

Back in October, I wrote a post about my process of becoming a MOTU. I’ve been pretty busy since October. First of all, I had this 9 month build finally finish:

Successfully signed dsc and changes files

Once things sort of settled down from that, I jumped back in to updating and syncing packages. This time I was mainly focusing on desktop packages, because that’s the group my mentor worked on. However, I wanted to get some different experiences, so I also worked on some new debian packages (one of which landed).

So after all this, I talked to a few people and it was suggested that I apply for MOTU. So I cleaned up my wikipage and applied for it. The DMB had a lot of questions in the meeting, but I guess I was persuasive enough because I was approved on June 6!

So what’s next? Personally, I want to keep doing updates, complete a SRU, land my other debian package, sponsor some packages, and help other people achieve their goal of being a MOTU also.

I feel that mentoring is probably one of the most important parts of being a MOTU, so even though I’m new, I’d love to help where I can. I can help by answering questions or helping with ideas of things to work on. Finding the work can sometimes be the hardest part, and the only path forward to becoming a MOTU is doing updates and syncs, so it’s critical to keep up the momentum. So if you’re working on this goal, find me on #ubuntu-motu as mfisch and we can chat.

When last time I was in Cambridge we had a discussion about ARM processors. Pawe? used term “ARMology” then. And with recent announcement of Cortex-A12 cpu core I thought that it may be a good idea to write a blog post about it.

Please note that my knowledge of ARM processors started in 2003 so I can make mistakes in everything older. Tried to understand articles about old times but sometimes they do not keep one version of story.

Ancient times

ARM1 got released in 1985 as CPU add-on to BBC Micro manufactured by Acorn Computers Ltd. as result of few years of research work. They wanted to have new processor to replace ageing 6502 used in BBC Micro and Acorn Electron and none of existing ones did not fit their requirements. Note that it was not market product but rather development tool made available for selected users.

But it was ARM2 which landed in new computers — Acorn Archimedes (1987 year). Had multiply instructions added so new version of instruction set was created: ARMv2. Just 8MHz clock but remember that it was first computer with new CPU…

Then ARM3 came — with cache controller integrated and 25MHz clock. ISA was bumped to ARMv2a due to SWP instruction added. And it was released in another Acorn computer: A5000. This was also used in Acorn A4 which was first ARM powered laptop (but term “ARM Powered” was created few years later). I hope that one day I will be able to play with all those old machines…

There was also ARM250 processor with ARMv2a instruction set like in ARM3 but no cache controller. But it is worth mentioning as it can be seen as first SoC due to ARM, MEMC, VIDC, IOC chips integrated in one piece of silicon. This allowed to create budget versions of computers.

ARM Ltd.

In 1990 Acorn, Apple and VLSI co-founded Advanced RISC Machines Ltd. company which took over research and development of ARM processors. Their business model was simple: “we work on cpu cores and other companies pay us license costs to make chips”.

Their first cpu was ARM60 with new instruction set: ARMv3. It had 32bit address space (compared to 26bit in older versions), was endian agnostic (so both big and little endian was possible) and there were other improvements.

Please note lack of ARM4 and ARM5 processors. I heard some rumours about that but will not repeat them here as some of them just do not fit when compared against facts.

ARM610 was powering Apple Newton PDA and first Acorn RiscPC machines where it was replaced by ARM710 (still ARMv3 instruction set but ~30% faster).

First licensees

You can create new processor cores but someone has to buy them and manufacture… In 1992 GEC Plessey and Sharp licensed ARM technology, next year added Cirrus Logic and Texas Instruments, then AKM (Asahi Kasei Microsystems) and Samsung joined in 1994 and then others…

From that list I recognize only Cirrus Logic (used their crazy EP93xx family), TI and Samsung as vendors of processors ;D

Thumb

One of next cpu cores was ARM7TDMI (Thumb+Debug+Multiplier+ICE) which added new instruction set: Thumb.

The Thumb instructions were not only to improve code density, but also to bring the power of the ARM into cheaper devices which may primarily only have a 16 bit datapath on the circuit board (for 32 bit paths are costlier). When in Thumb mode, the processor executes Thumb instructions. While most of these instructions directly map onto normal ARM instructions, the space saving is by reducing the number of options and possibilities available — for example, conditional execution is lost, only branches can be conditional. Fewer registers can be directly accessed in many instructions, etc. However, given all of this, good Thumb code can perform extremely well in a 16 bit world (as each instruction is a 16 bit entity and can be loaded directly).

ARM7TDMI landed nearly everywhere – MP3 players, cell phones, microwaves and any place where microcontroller could be used. I heard that few years ago half of ARM Ltd. income was from license costs of this cpu core…

ARM7

But ARM7 did not ended at ARM7TDMI… There was ARM7EJ-S core which used ARMv5TE instruction set and also ARM720T and ARM740T with ARMv4T. You can run Linux on Cirrus Logic CLPS711x/EP721x/EP731x ones ;)

According to ARM Ltd. page about ARM7 the ARM7 family is the world’s most widely used 32-bit embedded processor family, with more than 170 silicon licensees and over 10 Billion units shipped since its introduction in 1994.

ARM8

I heard that ARM8 is one of those things you should not ask ARM Ltd. people about. Nothing strange when you look at history…

ARM810 processor made use of ARMv4 instruction set and had 72MHz clock. At same time DEC released StrongARM with 200MHz clock… 1996 was definitively year of StrongARM.

In 2004 I bought my first Linux/ARM powered device: Sharp Zaurus SL-5500.

ARM9

Ah ARM9… this was huge family of processor cores…

ARM moved from a von Neumann architecture (Princeton architecture) to a Harvard architecture with separate instruction and data buses (and caches), significantly increasing its potential speed.

There were two different instruction sets used in this family: ARMv4T and ARMv5TE. Also some kind of Java support was added in the latter one but who knows how to use it — ARM keeps details of Jazelle behind doors which can be open only with huge amount of money.

ARMv4T

Here we have ARM9TDMI, ARM920T, ARM922T, ARM925T and ARM940T cores. I mostly saw 920T one in far too many chips.

My collection includes:

• ep93xx from Cirrus Logic (with their sick VFP unit)
• omap1510 from Texas Instruments
• s3c2410 from Samsung (note that some s3c2xxx processors are ARMv5T)

ARMv5T

Note: by ARMv5T I mean every cpu never mind which extensions it has built-in (Enhanced DSP, Jazelle etc).

I consider this one to be most popular one (probably after ARM7TDMI). Countless companies had own processors based on those cores (mostly on ARM926EJ-S one). You can get them even in QFP form so hand soldering is possible. CPU frequency goes over 1GHz with Kirkwood cores from Marvell.

In my collection I have:

• at91sam9263 from Atmel
• pxa255 from Intel
• st88n15 from ST Microelectronics

Had also at91sam9m10, Kirkwood based Sheevaplug and ixp425 based NSLU2 but they found new home.

ARM10

Another quiet moment in ARM history. ARM1020E, ARM1022E, ARM1026EJ-S cores existed but did not looked popular.

UPDATE: Conexant uses ARM10 core in their next generation DSL CPE systems such as bridge/routers, wireless DSL routers and DSL VoIP IADs.

ARM11

Released in 2002 as four new cores: ARM1136J, ARM1156T2, ARM1176JZ and ARM11 MPCore. Several improvements over ARM9 family including optional VFP unit. New instruction set: ARMv6 (and ARMv6K extensions). There was also Thumb2 support in arm1156 core (but I do not know did someone made chips with it). arm1176 core got TrustZone support.

I have:

• omap2430 from Texas Instruments
• i.mx35 from Freescale

Currently most popular chip with this family is BCM2835 GPU which got arm1136 cpu core on die because there was some space left and none of Cortex-A processor core fit there.

Cortex

New family of processor cores was announced in 2004 with Cortex-M3 as first cpu. There are three branches:

• Aplication
• Realtime
• Microcontroller

All of them (with exception of Cortex-M0 which is ARMv6) use new instruction sets: ARMv7 and Thumb-2 (some from R/M lines are Thumb-2 only). Several cpu modules were announced (some with newer cores):

• NEON for SIMD operations
• VFP3 and VFP4
• Jazelle RCT (aka ThumbEE).
• LPAE for more then 4GB ram support (Cortex A7/12/15)
• virtualization support (A7/12/15)
• big.LITTLE
• TrustZone

I will not cover R/M lines as did not played with them.

Cortex-A8

Announced in 2006 single core ARMv7a processor core. Released in chips by Texas Instruments, Samsung, Allwinner, Apple, Freescale, Rockchip and probably few others.

Has higher clocks than ARM11 cores and achieves roughly twice the instructions executed per clock cycle due to dual-issue superscalar design.

So far collected:

• am3358 from Texas Instruments
• i.mx515 from Freescale
• omap3530 from Texas Instruments

Cortex-A9

First multiple core design in Cortex family. Allows up to 4 cores in one processor. Announced in 2007. Looks like most of companies which had previous cores licensed also this one but there were also new vendors.

There are also single core Cortex-A9 processors on a market.

I have products based on omap4430 from Texas Instruments and Tegra3 from NVidia.

Cortex-A5

Announced around the end of 2009 (I remember discussion about something new from ARM with someone at ELC/E). Up to 4 cores, mostly for use in all designs where ARM9 and ARM11 cores were used. In other words new low-end cpu with modern instruction set.

Cortex-A15

The fastest (so far) core in ARMv7a part of Cortex family. Up to 4 cores. Announced in 2010 and expanded ARM line with several new things:

• 40-bit LPAE which extends address range to 1TB (but 32-bit per process)
• VFPv4
• Hardware virtualization support
• TrustZone security extensions

I have Chromebook with Exynos5250 cpu and have to admit that it is best device for ARM software development. Fast, portable and hackable.

Cortex-A7

Announced in 2011. Younger brother of Cortex-A15 design. Slower but eats much less power.

Cortex-A12

Announced in 2013 as modern replacement for Cortex-A9 designs. Has everything from Cortex-A15/A7 and is ~40% faster than Cortex-A9 at same clock frequency. No chips on a market yet.

big.LITTLE

That’s interesting part which was announced in 2011. It is not new core but combination of them. Vendor can mix Cortex-A7/12/15 cores to have kind of dual-multicore processor which runs different cores for different needs. For example normal operation on A7 to save energy but go up for A15 when more processing power is needed. And amount of cores in each of them does not even have to match.

It is also possible to make use of all cores all together which may result in 8-core ARM processor scheduling tasks on different cpu cores.

There are few implementations already: ARM TC2 testing platform, HiSilicon K3V3, Samsung Exynos 5 Octa and Renesas Mobile MP6530 were announced. They differ in amount of cores but all (except TC2) use the same amount of A7/A15 cores.

ARMv8

In 2011 ARM announced new 64-bit architecture called AArch64. There will be two cores: Cortex-A53 and Cortex-A57 and big.LITTLE combination will be possible as well.

Lot of things got changed here. VFP and NEON are parts of standard. Lot of work went into making sure that all designs will not be so fragmented like 32-bit architecture is.

I worked on AArch64 bootstrapping in OpenEmbedded build system and did also porting of several applications.

Hope to see hardware in 2014 with possibility to play with it to check how it will play compared to current systems.

Other designs

ARM Ltd. is not the only company which releases new cpu cores. That’s due to fact that there are few types of license you can buy. Most vendors just buy licence for existing core and make use of it in their designs. But some companies (Intel, Marvell, Qualcomm, Microsoft, Apple, Faraday and others) paid for ‘architectural license’ which allows to design own cores.

XScale

Probably oldest one was StrongARM made by DEC, later sold to Intel where it was used as a base for XScale family with ARMv5TEJ instruction set. Later IWMMXT got added in PXA27x line.

In 2006 Intel sold whole ARM line to Marvell which released newer processor lines and later moved to own designs.

There were few lines in this family:

• Application Processors (with the prefix PXA).
• I/O Processors (with the prefix IOP)
• Network Processors (with the prefix IXP)
• Control Plane Processors (with the prefix IXC).
• Consumer Electronics Processors (with the prefix CE).

One day I will undust my Sharp Zaurus c760 just to check how recent kernels work on PXA255 ;D

Marvell

Their Feroceon/PJ1/PJ4 cores were independent ARMv5TE implementations. Feroceon was Marvell’s own ARM9 compatible CPU in Kirkwood and others, while PJ1 was based on that and replaced XScale in later PXA chips. PJ4 is the ARMv7 compatible version used in all modern Marvell designs, both the embedded and the PXA side.

Qualcomm

Company known mostly from wireless networks (GSM/CDMA/3G) released first ARM based processors in 2007. First ones were based on ARM11 core (ARMv6 instruction set) and in next year also ARMv7a were available. Their high-end designs (Scorpion and Krait) are similar to Cortex family but have different performance. Company also has Cortex-A5 and A7 in low-end products.

Nexus 4 uses Snapdragon S4 Pro and I also have S4 Plus based Snapdragon development board.

Faraday

Faraday Technology Corporation released own processors which used ARMv4 instruction set (ARMv5TE in newer cores). They were FA510, FA526, FA626 for v4 and FA606TE, FA626TE, FMP626TE and FA726TE for v5te. Note that FMP626TE is dual core!

They also have license for Cortex-A5 and A9 cores.

Project Denver

Quoting Wikipedia article about Project Denver:

Project Denver is an ARM architecture CPU being designed by Nvidia, targeted at personal computers, servers, and supercomputers. The CPU package will include an Nvidia GPU on-chip.

The existence of Project Denver was revealed at the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show. In a March 4, 2011 Q&A article CEO Jen-Hsun Huang revealed that Project Denver is a five year 64-bit ARM architecture CPU development on which hundreds of engineers had already worked for three and half years and which also has 32-bit ARM architecture backward compatibility.

The Project Denver CPU may internally translate the ARM instructions to an internal instruction set, using firmware in the CPU.

X-Gene

AppliedMicro announced that they will release AArch64 processors based on own cores.

Final note

If you spotted any mistakes please write in comments and I will do my best to fix them. If you have something interesting to add also please do a comment.

I used several sources to collect data for this post. Wikipedia articles helped me with details about Acorn products and ARM listings. ARM infocenter provided other information. Dates were taken from Wikipedia or ARM Company Milestones page. Ancient times part based on The ARM Family and The history of the ARM CPU articles. The history of the ARM architecture was interesting and helpful as well.

Please do not copy this article without providing author information. Took me quite long time to finish it.

Changelog

8 June evening

Thanks to notes from Arnd Bergmann I did some changes:

• added ARM7, Marvell, Faraday, Project Denver, X-Gene sections
• fixed Cortex-A5 to be up to 4 cores instead of single.
• mentioned Conexant in ARM10 section.
• improved Qualcomm section to mention which cores are original ARM ones, which are modified.

David Alan Gilbert mentioned that ARM1 was not freely available on a market. Added note about it.

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz
ARMology was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

I was thinking about starting dogfooding Ubuntu Touch, and really for me the blocker is having a torch app! so here it is:

https://code.launchpad.net/~vtuson/+junk/torchapp

Tap in the lightbulb to turn the tourch on (tested on Galaxy Nexus). Image by  Ryan Hyde

Yesterday I spent a bit of time reading a thread on Arch Linux ARM forum about their issues with Samsung ARM Chromebook. And found interesting information there.

Why Arch Linux ARM? Because they posted guide for replacing original U-Boot with normal one. I plan to make some modifications to my Chromebook (once it return from service as I want my speakers back) and this will be one of them (other will be serial ports).

If someone want to try this distribution then Craig Errington describes on his blog how to install XFCE. I did not used it and do not plan to but will check for tweaks and hints to get my Ubuntu experience better.

So if you play with running other distributions than ChromeOS on you Chromebook then check their forum — maybe you will find something useful as well.

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz
Arch Linux ARM on Chromebook was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

Today I recorded a video demo of Ubuntu running on the Galaxy Nexus and showcasing much of the progress in May to turn the phone into a usable daily phone for early testers. The demo shows recieving a call and text, web browser, social networking integration, multitasting, a number of the apps, messaging menu, and more.

Here it is:

Can’t see it? Watch it here.

During ELCE in Barcelona I spoke with guys from Qualcomm about their new board, what it is etc. Some time later guys from Intrinsyc (manufacturer of board) contacted me with free coupon for it. I ordered board and received few days later. Played a bit then but my Linaro work occupied me so it went back to the box.

During Linaro Connect in Hong Kong I bought small mini-ITX case to have a way of storing Dragonboard in safe way under desk as I thought that it may be interesting machine for doing some ARM development. There is SATA, Ethernet, USB 2.0 on board so why not…

It came with Android 4.0.4 installed on on-board eMMC. I hope to replace it with Ubuntu or Debian one day. But first have to get kernel newer than 3.0 working on it.

Which may lead into usual problem — there is only vendor kernel for it as mainline lacks support for it. Probably kernel/msm repository from CodeAurora will be fine. Will see.

A bit to big to be useful as FM radio but had to check it ;D

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz
Booted my Dragonboard was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website