Ubuntu 12.10 on a Virtual Platform at ARM Techcon

Next week (Oct. 30-Nov. 1) ARM TechCon 2012 is at the Santa Clara Convention Center. As always, Cadence will be at the conference and exhibit, but I would like to especially recommend one paper for people interested in embedded Linux and Virtual Platforms.

The presentation is Analysis of Software-Driven Power-Management Policies Using Functional Virtual Platforms by Michele Petracca. It will be in Grand Ballroom B on Thursday at 10:30 AM.

I have seen some of the material in advance and it provides an interesting case study of Linux power management. Even better, some of the work was done using the Cadence Virtual Platform of the Zynq-7000 EPP.

I hope to see you there, and make sure to stop by the Cadence booth to learn about the Cadence's Virtual System Platform.

One of my most used resources is the ARM Cortex-A Series Programmer's Guide. The original blog post I wrote received a high number of hits as the word spread. I realized recently that the guide has been updated and is now available without a login, so I wanted to share the new location to obtain version 3.0. If you want to get up to speed before ARM TechCon this is a great place to start.

In other news, last week marked the release of the latest version of Ubuntu, version 12.10, also known as Quantal Quetzal. Most people would probably install it on a desktop, laptop, or netbook. I installed it on an ARM Virtual Platform. Click for a movie of fluxbox running on Ubuntu 12.10 on a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 Virtual Platform. The video shows 10 minutes of simulation time occurring in about 1 minute. Of course, the system is idle, but it's pretty fast even when there is more work to do. The movie should play fine in most versions of Firefox and Chrome.

My last news update is the simplification of Linux for ARM in the 3.7 kernel. As a person who works with Linux and ARM frequently, I have a different source tree for each project. As the article states, I pretty much spend all of my time in mach-<mach>/include/mach* since this is where most of the platform customization occurs. I'm looking forward to the improvements, and will watching for Linux on ARM info next week.

Hope to see you next week at ARM TechCon.

Jason Andrews