About Linaro

Executive Overview

• Linaro is where the ARM community provides shared investment and leadership in open source, with a mission to make it easier and quicker to develop Linux-based products
• Linaro enables popular Linux distributions on the latest ARM chips
• Linaro offers a validation and test facility for key distributions on hardware from multiple chip vendors

Open engineering has been practised from the start at Linaro with plans, specifications and progress available for inspection on the developer wiki at http://wiki.linaro.org. Linaro is distribution neutral: it wants to provide the best software foundations to everyone, and to reduce non-differentiating and costly low level fragmentation

Linaro's work can be grouped into three areas:

Upstream Engineering

Aligned investment is provided to existing upstream open source projects such as GCC, kernel.org, etc. The Linaro Technical Steering Committee develops the high level requirements for Linaro’s Engineering Working Groups, which then get expanded into detailed specifications (Blueprints) at Linaro Developer Summits. This work is a mixture of fixing broken code, consolidating different ARM implementations, improving performance and adding new functionality. Working Groups include the ARM toolchain, kernel consolidation, power management, graphics and multimedia. Code is continuously delivered upstream as patches, and monthly in tarballs, making it easy for OEMs and the community to get access to the latest code.

Linaro Evaluation Builds (LEBs)

The Linaro Platform Group takes the latest software and tools from the Working Groups and produces daily optimized builds of major distributions such as Android and Ubuntu. These evaluation builds are then continuously tested and benchmarked on members’ latest development boards in our networked hardware farm.

The goal is to provide quantitative data on improvements to software quality and performance. This focus on software quality will help accelerate product development time and the benchmarking will ensure that we continuously improve performance.

Landing Teams

These assist Linaro's silicon partners in transforming their Linux SoC support to focus on maximising the support in the Linux trunk, so that BSPs get smaller and are of higher quality. This benefits OEMs through higher quality BSPs enabling faster time to market for a range of advanced SoCs. Linaro members benefit by being able to support multiple distributions more easily. Because Landing Teams work closely with the chip companies BSP teams on unannounced hardware this activity is necessarily confidential.

The Need for Linaro

Making open source development easier and faster

Today's web-enabled gadgets have millions of lines of code, built from thousands of open source software packages. Linaro was created to solve a number of problems affecting open source development:

• Under-investment in open source projects that make up a mobile Linux platform
• Distribution and SoC fragmentation -multiple approaches to the same problems
• Limited optimization, with new performance features in ARM processors not being utilized
• Extended product development times because of complexity of integration of distributions with new SoCs and BSPs from device vendors

Linaro's members are investing into Linaro to gain the benefit of shared resources being utilized in reducing fragmentation and increasing performance of ARM architecture SoCs. Linaro's engineering team works in partnership with existing open source projects. By providing improved code and tools, and pushing these upstream we provide the building blocks for distributions to base their code on.

Our goal over time is to reduce distribution and SoC fragmentation, enabling our members to focus their own engineering teams on areas of strategic value. We also push the latest code and tools into the major distributions via our Linaro Evaluation Builds (initially for Android and Ubuntu).

Linaro's Working Groups are optimizing the toolchain, kernel and low level middleware to take advantage of new ARM architecture features such as hard floats, Thumb-2, NEON and SMP to improve performance in all distributions.

Linaro's Landing Teams are consolidating members BSPs, supporting the latest Linux kernels and working in partnership with our members to get the board support upstreamed. This reduces future porting and maintenance costs, and accelerates time to market for our members' customers.

The work that Linaro is undertaking benefits all those involved in developing open source based devices:

• Member SoC vendors are able to support multiple distributions more efficiently
• Device manufacturers get shorter time to market and improved performance
• Consumers get a diverse range of optimized devices delivered quickly to market
• Open source developers can get a range of low cost hardware with common versions of kernel, tools and low level software, enabling rapid innovation.
• Development tools will be continuously improved and freely available, making the writing and.
• debugging of code more cost effective and productive.
• Distributions can take the open source code from upstream or more quickly via Linaro
• Evaluation Builds that are available on multiple ARM-powered chips from Linaro's members

How Linaro Works

Linaro is a UK registered Not for Profit Company. It is sponsored by Core and Club members who provide subscription fees and software development engineers to ensure the organization has access to the dedicated resources needed to deliver compelling code, beneficial to both the sponsoring members and the broader community. Additional engineering resources are provided directly by Linaro and also by Linaro's engineering partners such as Canonical Ltd. The management team of Linaro works closely with partners and the community to bring together requirements, resources, and planning through open participative forums. The Technical Steering Committee provide high level requirements to the Working Groups who develop detailed specifications (blueprints) every 6 months. Most development occurring within Linaro is intended to flow directly into existing upstream projects. The use of a staging tree ensures everyone can benefit from the latest code on the latest hardware platforms in advance of all the code flowing upstream. All code developed within Linaro working groups is open source and therefore available under standard Open Source Initiative (OSI) license terms. For more details see Linaro Membership Rules and Linaro Articles of Association.

Membership Classes

There are two membership classes that sponsor Linaro activities: Core and Club. Linaro members provide resources to the organisation and have a seat on the Technical Steering Committee. They also have an option to have a landing team to assist in landing the latest open source software on their latest chips, and having their hardware included in the validation and test facility.

Core Members have Board level representation with significant input into the strategy and management of Linaro, and provide significant financial and engineering resources.

Club Members have a Seat on Technical Steering Committee providing input into requirements, have the ability to start new Working Groups and have access to Landing team support. Club members provides half the resources of a Core member.

Benefits of Membership

Open source software is one of the most significant trends in the creation of electronic devices. Being a leader in open source requires some level of collaboration and Linaro is the place where ARM, IBM and SoC vendors are making shared and aligned investments. If you are a chip developer, Linaro can help you get the latest OSS working on your latest SoCs and evaluation boards, which is critical to securing design wins. The Linaro Evaluation Builds for Android and Ubuntu will show your silicon off in the best light, with the highest performance and leading edge optimisations. The Linaro Test and Validation platform will provide you and your customers quantitative evidence of the maturity of your Board Support Package/Hardware Pack when used with the latest open source software. Landing Teams will assist your BSP team to upstream as much of the software support for your chip as possible. All of this makes it easier for OEMs and ODMs to make great products with optimized open source software and get them to market much more quickly.

Investing in Linaro by becoming a Core or Club member is a strategic decision to become a leader in open source software, and to do that through shared investment and industry alignment. Core and Club members have significant influence in the organisation; primarily through their seat on the Technical Steering Committee but also through day to day involvement in the Working Groups, Platform Team and interaction with Linaro management.

Linaro Partner Program

Organisations that wish to offer services, support or other related businesses based on Linaro's engineering output are encouraged to apply for the Linaro Partner Program. This is a marketing program for organisations that have contributed a Linaro Partner Engineer into our engineering team. These engineers act as a conduit of knowledge back to the sponsoring company about Linaro's activities, and contribute to the Working Groups or Platform Teams.

Community

Non-members can get involved by using the Community resources and aligning with Linaro's open engineering. The Community manager can be contacted by e-mail or IRC and will help connect you to the technical teams. Anyone can join the mailing lists, IRC chat, work on projects and attend Linaro Developer Summits/code sprints. All that is required is a Linaro Launchpad login to get started.