No Secret Sauce, Just Open Source

Codethink, expert developers of Linux-based device solutions showed a version of the latest Linux 3.15 kernel with a Baserock operating system and 100% open source graphics driver stack running on NVIDIA’s new Jetson development board. Putting the whole solution together took just 24 hours.

"This shows what’s possible with the right people working on a fully open source software stack with Baserock", said Codethink CEO Paul Sherwood. "Linux 3.15 was released late Sunday in California. We got our board on Monday. James started the work on Tuesday. By Wednesday we had a fully working system, with wayland and weston running EGL clients using totally open technologies."

James Thomas did the work using the Baserock operating system workflow designed by Codethink’s world-class team.

"It’s pretty exciting to show that we can now get a complete bang-up-to-date Linux operating system running on this amazing board in 24 hours," said James. "Most projects take weeks or months to get to this stage, if you can get there at all."

"Keeping the whole software stack open means you can innovate faster and optimise all the way down to the metal," said Codethink CTO Rob Taylor. "No NDAs, no third party dependencies, no secret sauce, just open source. Hats off to NVIDIA for their great community contributions that have made this possible, and to the great work done by the free and open source software developers around the world."

The NVIDIA Jetson TK1 features a 4-core A15 cpu and a 192-core Kepler K1, all for under $200. We think this is the start of a new era of ARM boards featuring fully open hardware accelerated graphics software support with the backing of the silicon vendor. The high performance and low price make it ideal both for kickstarter projects and for established players. For more information about NVIDIA Jetson see developer.nvidia.com/jetson-tk1

About Baserock

Baserock is an open source project originally created by Codethink engineers, which integrates a large set of open source and free software components into complete custom operating systems. It’s a bit like a Linux distro, a build system, a workflow and a development environment all in one. The general aim of the project is to fix the things that are wrong with systems software engineering.

For more information about Baserock see wiki.baserock.org.