Lisbon, Portugal – May 15th, 2025 – At Linaro Connect 2025, Linaro CTO Grant Likely delivered a compelling keynote reflecting on the transformative journey of the Arm ecosystem over the past 16 years. He highlighted the evolution from a fragmented landscape requiring extensive engineering efforts to a unified, mature architecture now leading across mobile, desktop, cloud, edge, and automotive sectors. 
“When Linaro started, the Arm ecosystem needed significant work across the stack—from toolchains and kernels to libraries and applications,” said Likely. “Today, Arm stands as the primary architecture across diverse computing domains, a testament to the collaborative efforts of our community.”
Key Highlights from Linaro’s contributions:
-
Mainstream Adoption of Arm: Major hyperscalers now offer Arm instances as standard, reflecting its central role in cloud computing.
-
Enhanced Developer Workflows: GitHub’s introduction of Arm runners for both Linux and Windows streamlines CI/CD processes, broadening Arm’s accessibility to developers worldwide.
-
Advancements in AI: Arm’s architecture is pivotal in powering AI workloads, from training models in data centers to deploying them on edge devices.
-
Expansion of Windows on Arm: Collaborations with Microsoft and Qualcomm have led to significant progress in Windows on Arm, enabling native support for applications like OBS Studio and Blender. 
He emphasized that the growth of the Arm ecosystem is exponential and Linaro plays a pivotal role in the ecosystem. As barriers to entry lower, a broader pool of developers can contribute, accelerating innovation.
Looking Ahead:
The keynote also addressed upcoming challenges and areas of focus for Linaro:
-
Cyber Resilience Act (CRA): Understanding and adapting to new regulations to ensure the continued delivery of high-quality open-source software.
-
Security Enhancements: Leveraging architectural features like Arm’s Confidential Compute Architecture (CCA) to build more secure systems. 
-
System Complexity Management: Developing solutions for communication between heterogeneous processors, exemplified by the VirtIO message specification’s adoption in automotive and mobile sectors.
Linaro Connect 2025 continues through May 16, featuring keynotes from industry leaders, technical sessions, and demonstrations. Linaro Connect 2026 will take place at the Melia Avenida America hotel in Madrid, Spain - April 29th - May 1st.
For more information, visit https://www.linaro.org/connect/schedule
About Linaro
Linaro empowers rapid product deployment within the dynamic Arm ecosystem. Our cutting-edge solutions and collaborative platforms facilitate the swift development, testing, and delivery of Arm-based innovation, enabling businesses to stay ahead in today’s competitive technology landscape. Our expertise and contributions spread from Kernel, Testing & Linux long-term support, Security, Cloud and Edge Computing, IoT, AI, Automotive, CI/CD, Toolchain, Virtualization to vertical projects which focus on enablement and maintenance such as Windows on Arm and Android Ecosystem.
Linaro fosters an environment of collaboration, standardization, and optimization among businesses and open source ecosystems, and plays a pivotal role in open source discovery and adoption.
Linaro has enabled trust, quality, and collaboration since 2010.
Visit www.linaro.org