ARM Community: Software Enablement - ARM Community

The past three years we have seen explosive growth in the use of the NEON™ SIMD engine by many of our software partners in the open-source community. The engine itself, defined as part of the ARM® Architecture, Version 7 (ARMv7), has shown itself to be extremely flexible and able to accelerate everything from Video Codecs such as VP8 to elements of the emerging HTML5 standard including <svg> and <canvas> filters. From an applications developer viewpoint, all of this acceleration takes place behind the scenes in upstream open source projects that are harvested to build the latest and greatest open source operating systems and frameworks such as Android™ and QT. While it is good to kno...

The new DS-5 Community Edition brings CPU and GPU statistics together to speed up Android games and applications

Game Developers Conference (GDC), San Francisco - These are very special days for Android application developers targeting ARM processor-based devices.

On March 2nd the version of the ARM® Development Studio 5 (DS-5™) toolchain dedicated to Android native application developers, the DS-5 Community Edition (CE), was selected as finalist for the Eclipse Community Awards in the ...

2011 was a busy year for developing software on ARM and the activity is reflected in the page views of top Software Enablement blogs. The topics included managing caches, Android (multiple), NEON (multiple), Memory Access Ordering, RISC vs CISC architectures (multiple), and optimizing assembly code (listed by popularity below). In addition, the Software Enablement Community pages (Linux, Solution Center for Android, RTOS, Microsoft, etc) were some of the highest referenced pages on the ARM site. Please let us know if you have more ideas for easing your software development on the ...

DirectFB (Direct Frame Buffer) is a graphics library that is widely used in embedded systems, especially home market. More and more applications or libraries choose DirectFB as backend, such as Cairo, GDK, Qt, V8, X11 and Webkit. ARM NEON technology could be well used in 2D acceleration. In this blog, I’ll describe how to optimize DirecFB using NEON.

1. Introduction
1.1 DirectFB Introduction
DirectFB (Direct Frame Buffer) is a thin library that provides hardware graphics acceleration, input device handling and abstraction, integrated windowing system with support for translucent windows and multiple display layers. It is free software licensed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). Graphics features provided by DirectFB including Rectangle Filling/Drawing; Triangle Filling/Drawing; Line Drawing Blit; Alpha Blending (texture alpha, alpha modulation); Porter/Duff; Colorizing; Source Color Ke...

This blog describes some of the techniques available to deploy and debug native Android applications on target. My main focus for setting about on this debug session was to debug an application generated by the Airplay SDK (see footnote#), a cross-platform development SDK that primarily uses host debug tools like Visual Studio and Xcode to debug a version of the mobile application built for the desktop. Using workflows that combine the powerful and easy to use DS-5 Debugger with Airplay SDK, developers can gain the convenience and flexibility which they greatly need when debugging code on target.

I’m going to start from the point of view that you already have the Android SDK and NDK installed since Google’s documentation goes through that process with some step-by-step instructions. I als...

]现代网页主要构建于三大技术：HTML、CSS和JavaScript。JavaScript推动了交互式网页的发展；JavaScript执行速度慢也就意味着网页打开的速度慢。所以现在，人们做了大量的工作，努力改善JavaScript的性能，让我们能够拥有与台式机相同的功能，无论身处何处，都能轻松体验到强大的网页应用。

Gmail、Google Maps和Google Docs等网络应用程序均广泛使用JavaScript，借助快速高效的JavaScript引擎，各类系统的用户体验得到了极大改善。正是在此驱使下，2008...

在第一篇中，我们分享了数字家庭软件平台的发展趋势和特点；
在第二篇中，我们归纳了将Android移植到电视、机顶盒平台需要面对的五大技术挑战并重点探讨了挑战1 ： 符合电视体验的2D/3D图形性能和用户交互模式方面的挑战。

在第三篇中， 我们探讨了更多的挑战， 包括“适合大屏的丰富多媒体影音体验”，“如何集成数字电视相关功能”， “如何推动应用开发者开发适合于TV的Android应用”；
在本篇中，我们将一起来关注在内容保护/系统安全方面的挑战以及And...

This article describes how to get Android running on your favourite ARM-based System on Chip (SoC) board. We run through the overall procedure and point out potential pitfalls and other things that you may encounter.

Since the Android software stack was primarily designed around the ARM Architecture, there are not many things that need amending to get it to work on another ARM platform.

We assume that your workstation has Ubuntu (10.10 or later) Operating System installed, and that you have already followed the instructions found at [1] to be ready to build Android sources. These instructions have been tested with Ubuntu 10.10, but they should be compatible with other GNU/Linux OSes.

Terminology

For the purposes of this document, we use the following terms.

Mainline kernel ...

Android作为优秀的开源软件解决方案, 它的作用域已经从手机市场,波及到了平板电脑,甚至以数字电视、机顶盒为典型应用的数字家庭领域。Android最初是为手机移动设备量身定做的,它默认支持的分辨率，色彩深度， 多媒体播放架构，用户交互方式，2D/3D图形的性能等都无法适应类似于数字电视，机顶盒这样的家庭应用。
因此，将Android移植到数字电视或机顶盒需要对Android进行大量的定制和修改。这些修改和定制涉及到Android软件架构中的各个层面，我将用四篇Blog来依次介绍如何将标准的Android移植到数字电视或机顶盒平台。

在开始我们的讨论之前， 我们先来简单探讨一下目前数字电视和机顶盒软件的现状和未来
数字电视/机顶盒软件的现状目前， 数字电视和机顶盒的软件架构中由于使用了不同的操作系统， �...

The modern web is built primarily from three technologies: HTML, CSS and JavaScript. It is JavaScript that drives the interactive web; slow JavaScript means slow web pages. So today, a huge amount of effort is being put into improving the performance of JavaScript, giving us access to powerful web applications, with features from your desktop, but available wherever you are.

Web applications like Gmail, Google Maps and Google Docs use JavaScript extensively, and the user experience is greatly improved on systems with fast, efficient JavaScript engines. In 2008, this motivated Google to create the V8 JavaScript engine project.

V8 is now, on modern benchmarks, the fastest JavaScript engine available. Rather than interpreting JavaScript as the old engines used to do, V8 uses a Just-In-Time compiler to produce and execute native instructions tailored to the processor on which it is running. The generated instructions are cached, avoiding the overhead of repeated code generation, and deleted when no longer needed.

V8 is now the core technology used in a number of important applications. It is the JavaScript engine used in Google's super-f...

With the recent release of Gingerbread and the number of daily Android on ARM activations up to 300,000 (see James Bruce’s blog), the opportunity for developers has never been better. The tools developers have to work with have also never been better. The Gingerbread update brings a strong focus on enabling the developer to create premium content for a rapidly growing consumer market.

Android has long since included a Native Development Kit (NDK) alongside their Software Development Kit (SDK). The NDK enables the creation of native functions in C and/or ARM assembly code. These functions can then be called by Java applications via the Java Native Interface (JNI). A principle software engineer at ARM, under the pen name ARM_DaveB, has written a ...

The 2010 ARM Technology Conference (Techcon) is taking place in Santa Clara next week. A large number of companies will be presenting their solutions to support development and optimization of products based on ARM technology, and open source will be discussed in many of these with projects like Linux, Android and development tools. For instance, many of these solutions are using open source to leverage earlier work that ARM has done with the open source community, contributing CPU and architecture support to the upstream Linux kernel and GNU compilation tools ahead of partner silicon platforms being available. One of the most recent illustrations is the contribution of Cortex-A15 CPU support to the Linux kernel as the processor was announced. Linux kernel and GNU development tools are key building blocks to support the development of solutions such as Android, ...

With new devices and new capabilities being exposed by the Android NDK (Native Development Kit) it is now possible to really get the best out of these ARM based devices. Here are a few quick tips to help that along.

1 - Stay on Target

The newest devices are generally ARMv7, meaning that it can pay to use v7 builds and features. The latest version of the NDK adds support ARMv7 and NEON code allowing key loops and media operations to be optimized far beyond what would otherwise be possible. The NDK provides a small static library that will allow you to identify what options you have at runtime. For examples of how to use these features, look at the hello-neon example project in the samples directory of the NDK

The older devices are v6, but the NDK does not specifically support it, leaving you with the choice of building safely for v5TE or taking the risk that there may be v5TE devices out there. If you need every iota of speed, and know what hardware you are targeting, then it may be worth building for v6. The newest devices, supporting Android 2.0 and up, seem generally to be ARMv7 based, although yo...

Sitting in the airport at the end of a week’s business trip to the US, I reflected back on the week. It turned out that my colleague on this trip has an even worse sense of direction than myself…Potentially disastrous, especially when you’re driving between airports, hotels and meetings in cities that you’ve never visited. This is where Google Maps becomes utterly indispensable. Installed on my Nokia E71 it makes use of the built in GPS and 3G and Edge networks to provide a running view of where we are, driving or walking. Without it we wouldn’t have found the wonderful Boulderado hotel or the Boulder Bookstore with its impressive converted ballroom. Actually, we’d probably still be driving around somewhere near Dallas.

Life changing and mind boggling as the online, always connected life of a sometime digital nomad is, w...

ARM is hiring OK, so that got some people’s attention and confused others – actually we are hiring, and in particular software developers. What can often come as a surprise to people is that as well as having a team of people that go plan and work alongside some our different software partners, ARM has a software engineering group that work on key bits of software, particularly on Cortex-A8 and Cortex-A9 projects. In fact it's very likely that some of the code running your mobile phone was developed by some of the ARM team.

The team cover a wide range of software projects that include:Web and web runtime optimization, for example JavaScript JIT optimization work on projects such as Tamarin, Webkit and Squirrelfish NitroExtreme), and OpenJDK optimization work.Operating System development – including Android, Linux kernel hacking and a ...