Linaro announces availability of AOSP Port

Linaro has announced that a port of the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) to the ARMv8-A architecture has been made available as part of the Linaro 14.06 release. This port has been tested on an ARMv8-A 64-bit hardware development platform, code-named “Juno”, available from ARM for lead and ecosystem partners.

The Linaro ARMv8-A reference software stack combined with the ARM Development Platform (ADP) provides the ARM ecosystem with a foundation to accelerate 64-bit Android availability on silicon. The availability of this port is the culmination of a broad architecture enablement program carried out by Linaro, ARM and the ARM partnership. ARM partners now have access to a 64-bit and 32-bit AOSP file system, together with a broad range of supporting material including the ARMv8 Fast Models, open-source tool chain from Linaro and supporting documentation.

“We have been using ARM Fast Models to develop 64-bit ports for AOSP for a long time and it is a testament to the quality of our collaborative engineering that we have delivered them running on the ARMv8-A hardware platform so quickly. We look forward to working closely with our members to enable them to deliver next-generation Android solutions rapidly to the market,” said George Grey, CEO, Linaro.

The Linaro 14.06 release includes a 64-bit primary/32-bit secondary binary image and source code based on the Linaro Stable Kernel (LSK) 3.10 for Android, compiled with GCC 4.9 and tested on both the ARMv8-A 64-bit hardware platform and ARMv8-A Fast Models. The AOSP is based on the Open Master snapshot downloaded on June 1st with HDMI drivers loaded as modules. The release is built with the Android real-time (ART) compiler as the default virtual machine with the same source supporting both 32- and 64-bit user spaces on hardware and virtual platforms. Peripheral and advanced power management support plus several accelerations will not be available in this release, but will follow in the future releases on a monthly cadence.