BREAKING..Android performance boosted 30-100 percent by Linaro toolchain; The CyanogenMod project and Google's AOSP are merging the Linaro improvements.
by Ryan Paul - June 12 2012, 5:50pm USMST
arstechnica.com
ANDROID OPEN SOURCE 26
Linaro’s efforts have boosted Android’s performance, delivering an improvement of 30 to 100 percent in various benchmarks. They achieved these impressive gains by adapting Android 4 so that it could be built with their improved GCC toolchain.
We first wrote about Linaro in 2010 when the non-profit organization was founded by a consortium of hardware and software companies, including ARM, Samsung, TI, and Canonical. Linaro has worked to improve the quality of Linux on the ARM architecture, focusing largely on hardware-enablement and tooling.
The group is closely aligned with Ubuntu, but the improvements that it is driving offer benefits for the broader ecosystem of platforms and distributions that are deployed on ARM hardware. They have done a lot of work upstream in GCC (the GNU Compiler Collection) to open the door for better ARM optimization in Linux and other open source software.
Linaro’s GCC improvements have been producing measurable performance advantages over Google’s stock Android environment and build toolchain since late last year. Google is reportedly accepting some of these improvements in the upstream Android Open Source Project and independent developers are also looking to put them to use.
As a recent blog post at Liliputing pointed out, Linaro improvements are being merged in Cyanogen, a popular third-party ROM that is maintained through a community-driven process. Enthusiasts have already started generating device-specific builds that incorporated the Linaro patches. A Linaro build for the Galaxy Nexus, for example, was published this week on reddit (disclosure: reddit is a cousin site of Ars).
If you are looking for more information about Linaro, or want to get involved, you can find out more by visiting the organization’s website or checking out the Linaro projects that are hosted on the Launchpad collaboration site.
Update: updated to indicate that Google is merging the improvements, based on a Google+ comment made by Google engineer Jean-Baptiste Queru. |
