There's now full support for Linux kernel 4.2

Sep 27, 2015 22:22 GMT  ·  By

Canonical's Oliver Grawert has had the great pleasure of announcing the general availability of the new and improved Raspberry Pi 2 image of the Ubuntu Snappy Core 15.04 operating system.

Being based on the latest Linux 4.2 kernel, the Ubuntu Snappy Core 15.04 Raspberry Pi 2 image is fully working, all of its device parts have received internal modifications in order to work perfectly with Linux kernel 4.2, and it uses the linux-raspi2 package that has recently been shipped by the Ubuntu Kernel team on the official Ubuntu software repositories.

There are a host of new features implemented in the new and improved Raspberry Pi 2 image for Ubuntu Snappy Core 15.04, mostly because the port now has a fully supported Linux kernel package. Among the most important ones, we can mention support for the I2C and SPI (Serial Peripheral Interface) communication protocols, as well as the enablement of general-purpose input/output (GPIO) access by default.

"I'm happy to announce that the new and improved RPi2 image is now also ready for use," says Oliver Grawert. "The device parts have been switched to use a 4.2 kernel now, kudos to the Ubuntu Kernel team for the hard work to get the linux raspi2 package into the Ubuntu archive so we could base on it."

DTB overlays are now supported

In addition to the changes mentioned above, the new Raspberry Pi 2 image for Canonical's latest Ubuntu Snappy Core 15.04 (Vivid Vervet) operating system is now capable of handling DTB overlays, which is an essential feature for the enablement of support for PWM, sound output, and much more. There's also support for a vast array of devices, thanks to the addition of the full linux-firmware Ubuntu package.

Last but not least, the Ubuntu Snappy Core 15.04 Raspberry Pi 2 image comes now with initial support for the system-image server, which users will be able to test-drive right now by manually building (detailed instructions are available in the announcement) an image using the ubuntu-device-flash utility. The next major release of the Ubuntu Snappy Core Raspberry Pi 2 image will offer full support for system-image server. Download Ubuntu Snappy Core 15.04 for Raspberry Pi 2.