Monday 10 October 2011

Maverick October

Minor update to fix some annoying bugs and pull in some performance updates

No kernel update. Just userspace fixes to improve user experience:
  • Preinstall NEON optimized libc functionality. Note this means that TO2 systems may become unstable unless users edit the installed filesystem /etc/ld.so.preload file to remove the library location (you do not need to uninstall the imx-libc-neon package as any updates will only change the file on TO3+ systems). This will improve system performance on very large memory copies, string searching and so on (not so much on tiny amounts of data, in fact system performance may slow down on these). Multimedia and Xorg are the biggest beneficiaries.
  • Preinstall libpixman 2.23 for enhanced performance on Xorg fallbacks (this significantly speeds up things like changing the backdrop in GNOME. Unfortunately other apps that use pixman (firefox is the biggest example) use an internal version and do not directly benefit except from improved system graphics performance.
  • Updated packages for imx-boot-scripts fixes some PulseAudio problems, SPDIF module loading, and bumps the compressed swap cache to 128MB (ramzswap default)
  • Uninstall and remove cache for "prelink" as it seems to do more harm than good for performance (including spending a lot of time scanning the system every week, and soaking up compressed swap cache for no good reason)
  • Fix software-center not running
  • Maverick Updates that were pushed the day we released the image (including apt, tzdata and firefox update to fix the DigiNotar SSL certificate security issue)
For users not willing to reinstall, you can fix software-center by running the following in a terminal (this will take around 10 minute to complete):
sudo update-apt-xapian-index
sudo dpkg-reconfigure software-center

7 comments:

  1. Boom! Happy about the SPDIF fixes, touch wood.

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  2. Thanks! I installed it on my smartbook and works fine. The first fresh install, when I didn't remove pulseaudio on first login :-)

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  3. How to record sound?
    I can see some signal from audacity and gnome-recorded, but when then I listen what I have recordered and I can listen only some little noise.
    The input level is at the top level.

    I have see that from the realease of September the cpu scaling look like that doesn't run anymore...

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  4. what about flash? without it its 50% useless

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  5. robyinno:

    CPU scaling is disabled since it doesn't scale properly. There are so many bugs involved in doing it that it was just causing a nightmare. The ondemand governor for the CPU is in itself not exactly "on demand" (it takes a significant amount of time for it to realise and bump the CPU speed up) and will scale down at every opportunity.

    I personally am a great believer in the "race to idle" - CPU should be powered up and in full clock while there is work to do. ondemand simply doesn't have the ability to realise work is "on the way" which means you spend half your time running at 166MHz and not 800MHz or 1GHz. This effectively knocks 25% of your system performance out of the window, for what is holistically the least power consuming part of your system (the Cortex-A8 core is remarkably power efficient).

    You have better chance of improving battery life AND playing movies for 4 or 5 hours without a charge if you turn the screen brightness down. I measured the difference between performance and ondemand as about 13 minutes, which on a 6 hour battery is absolutely negligible.

    k0nrad:

    Flash won't be released until Adobe let it pass certification. Once that's done we can ship it royalty-free but unfortunately it's not done. We have tried to submit it and we have gotten back a response very similar to "we won't be certifying this plugin version for Desktop Linux."

    Android is a little different, we could submit that today and in 6 weeks maybe have a certified plugin, but we have no Android focus (and IMO, won't until Google release the Ice Cream Sandwich source fully so we can do a port).

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  6. I have forgotten if i have installed this October image or if i am still on the September one !

    Any quick way to check - by installed lib versions or file/folder dates etc.

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  7. I tried to run installer from the sd card on smarttop, but it hangs, last log lines are:

    Loading, please wait...
    [ 2.600665] mmc1: new SDHC card at address e624
    [ 2.608245] mmcblk0: mmc1:e624 SU04G 3.69 GiB
    [ 2.613019] mmcblk0: p1 p2
    [ 2.686120] udev[541]: starting version 163
    [ 2.924078] usbcore: registered new interface driver usbfs
    [ 2.929642] usbcore: registered new interface driver hub
    [ 2.935246] usbcore: registered new device driver usb
    [ 2.965782] ehci_hcd: USB 2.0 'Enhanced' Host Controller (EHCI) Driver
    [ 3.080469] fsl-ehci fsl-ehci.0: Freescale On-Chip EHCI Host Controller
    [ 3.087170] fsl-ehci fsl-ehci.0: new USB bus registered, assigned bus number 1
    [ 3.121020] fsl-ehci fsl-ehci.0: irq 18, io base 0x73f80000
    [ 3.140907] fsl-ehci fsl-ehci.0: USB 2.0 started, EHCI 1.00
    [ 3.147116] usb usb1: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
    [ 3.152922] hub 1-0:1.0: USB hub found
    [ 3.156748] hub 1-0:1.0: 1 port detected
    [ 3.380512] usb 1-1: new high speed USB device using fsl-ehci and address 2
    [ 3.392061] fsl-ehci fsl-ehci.1: Freescale On-Chip EHCI Host Controller
    [ 3.398755] fsl-ehci fsl-ehci.1: new USB bus registered, assigned bus number 2
    [ 3.430477] fsl-ehci fsl-ehci.1: irq 14, io base 0x73f80200
    [ 3.520420] fsl-ehci fsl-ehci.1: USB 2.0 started, EHCI 1.00
    [ 3.526522] usb usb2: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
    [ 3.532352] hub 2-0:1.0: USB hub found
    [ 3.536178] hub 2-0:1.0: 1 port detected
    [ 3.590497] usb 1-1: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
    [ 3.760338] fsl-ehci fsl-ehci.2: Freescale On-Chip EHCI Host Controller
    [ 3.767004] fsl-ehci fsl-ehci.2: new USB bus registered, assigned bus number 3

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