Linaro Connect San Diego 2019

LCG has had a lighting talks session for a few Connects now. We talk about portions of our work that don't necessarily fit into a full-sized session, but are interesting for members and attendees nevertheless.

Armv8.2 features has been announced a few years ago, but the uptake of Armv8.2 features in Android has been slow. In 2018, flagship Android phones with ARMv8.2 features start to appear in the market. It is important that Arm's partners products fully exploit the latest architectural features.

In this presentation, we will share our story of deploying ARMv8.x features in Android Runtime (ART), go over the challenges and solutions for enabling those features in lower Android layers, and the optimisations we eventually developed in ART with ARMv8.x instructions.

We will also share the simulator solution we developed for testing & debugging ARMv8.x features easily for Android Runtime without the need of actual hardware.

Android is undergoing serious changes related to boot flow. Those can be mandatory requirements for vendors, especially for new devices. During this session we will review those changes and how it can be implemented in bootloaders, using U-Boot as an example.