Projects

AI Project

Artificial Intelligence related activities that span from Server, Edge to Micro-controllers.

• Micro-Controller activity is primarily focused on MicroTVM an open source AI compiler framework under active development.
• Cortex-A related efforts involve the following AI frameworks : ArmNN, ACL (Arm Compute Library), ONNX, PyTorch, Tensorflow, Tensorflow Lite and Tensorflow Micro.

The project includes a CI system which is made up of a diverse set of member hardware to perform validation and benchmarking to catch regressions. Many open source AI framework communities do not include an ARM as such having one an important in order to advance our work

Arm Server Architecture

Primarily focused on Server Standardisation. Examples to include SBSA, xBBR to enable simplified adoption of mainline builds on new server hardware.

Big Data & Data Science

Make ARM64 a first class citizen in the Hadoop/Spark community and scale-out analytics

Cloud Infrastructure

The Cloud infrastructure team focuses on cloud infrastructure technologies such as Kubernetes, OpenStack, Ceph, and container runtime.

We dedicate to make open-source cloud infrastructure projects have the capabilities of easy deployment, easy management, and good performance on Arm64.

We also run the Linaro Developer Cloud. It is a pure open-source cloud, free for developers. It offers the virtual machine instances and Kubernetes as a service. Link: www.linaro.cloud

GNU Toolchain

Development of GNU Toolchain:

• GCC compiler
• We improve Link-Time Optimizations (LTO), SVE auto-vectorization optimizations, and microarchitecture-specific optimizations for popular Arm cores.
• We improve performance and scalability of Libgomp (GNU OpenMP runtime)
• We support compiler sanitizers (ASAN, TSAN, etc.) in GCC. Sanitizers are developed under LLVM Toolchain project, and sanitizer changes are then merged into GCC to have both LLVM and GNU toolchains provide sanitizer features.
• GDB debugger
• We develop support for new ARMv8.x architectural features and improve debugging experience.
• Glibc C Library
• We implement both target-specific and generic optimizations in Glibc. We then aim to propagate all relevant Glibc improvements to Newlib and Bionic C libraries.
• GNU Binutils assembler, BFD and Gold linkers
• In Binutils we implement ELF section-level optimizations, as well as workarounds for hardware errata.

HPC-AI

High Performance Computing & Artificial Intelligence

Drive the adoption of ARM in HPC through standardisation, interoperability, orchestration and use case development. Leverage ARM-based hardware around server class infrastructure, multi-gigabit interconnect support, scalable vector extensions and software ecosystem support to build exascale HPC deployments. The engineering focus is on OpenHPC, application performance, AI solutions, SVE enablement and hardware deployment.

LLVM Toolchain

Development of LLVM Toolchain:

• Clang compiler
• We implement new and improve existing code-size and code-speed optimizations for AArch64 and ARM targets.
• LLDB debugger
• We develop support for new ARMv8.x architectural features and improve debugging experience.
• Compiler-RT runtime libraries
• We port and improve compiler sanitizers (ASAN, TSAN, etc.) to AArch64 and ARM architectures. Sanitizer changes are then merged into GCC to have both LLVM and GNU toolchains provide sanitizer features.
• LLD linker
• In LLD linker we implement ELF section-level optimizations, as well as workarounds for hardware errata.

Linaro's OP-TEE Contributions

OP-TEE is an open source TEE that has been well received by SoC vendors and OEMs and has been deployed in mobile phones, tablets, cameras, set-top boxes etc. On this project page you will find what Linaro plans to work with when it comes to OP-TEE.

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Linaro used to own the OP-TEE project, but in September 2019 the ownership was transferred to the TrustedFirmware.org project. Despite that Linaro still continues to contribute to the OP-TEE project just as before, the only difference is that Linaro should from now on be seen as any other contributor to the OP-TEE project. To try to avoid confusion with OP-TEE at TrustedFirmware.org, we've named our project "Linaro OP-TEE contributions".

This means that Linaro makes an internal roadmap for OP-TEE, a roadmap that is in sync with the members of Linaro as well as with the TrustedFirmware.org project.

Linux Kernel Quality

Our mission is to improve the quality of the Linux kernel by performing functional testing on Arm hardware. Our focus is on LTS, stable, and upstream development branches.

Linux Storage Evolution

Although a lot of changes happened in the linux storage over the past years with rewrite of the kernel’s block layer and new I/O schedulers, some areas like embedded storage and I/O latency performance still deserve further improvements. The project will focus on delivering these missing features.

Power and Performance Project

Performance and Power Management have always been tightly linked because the power consumption often arises as a variable of the performance of the system. Mobile Phone world has been one of the most active contributors in this area with the aim to run always more powerful systems on always more constrained batteries. In fact, most of systems can’t afford to simply put everything to its maximum performance level but has to follow either a thermal budget or a maximum power budget. In this way, large systems also have to deal with those constraints in order to use their power budget efficiently and reach maximum performances. This project aims to improve the efficiency of all ARM based Linux systems, small or large, by improving Linux subsystems that influence its performance or power consumption, which includes the scheduler or the thermal framework in addition to the traditional power management subsystems.

QEMU

Expanding various tools (especially QEMU) to emulate new ARM architectural features so open source projects can rapidly adopt the latest technology. We also continually improve ARMs hardware virtualization aiming for feature parity with other popular enterprise architectures.

Stratos

There is a growing trend towards virtualization in areas other than the tradition server environment. The server enviroment is uniform in nature but as we move towards a richer echosystem in automotive, medical and general mobile and the IoT spaces, the rich array of hypervisors and SoCs become a problem.

Project Stratos is working towards developing hypervisor agnostic Virtio interfaces and standards.
The four key areas of interest are

• High performance Virtio interfaces
• Virtual Machine Monitors with a safety island
• Boot Orchestration
• Written Standards for the hypercalls

System Control and Management Interface

System Control and Management Interface (SCMI) has been designed to standardize the interface between a power coprocessor and other parts of a SoC. That includes the application processor (AP) on which we can have both rich OS like Linux but also a TEE like OP-TEE.
Each client of the power coprocessor has its own access point with specific control permissions on the power resources. But on some “medium/small” systems, the power coprocessor may not be present or doesn’t provide enough access points. In such a case, the AP itself has to control and filter the access to the power resources.
For security reason, the TEE must have the control of shared resources and populate the authorized resources to the non secure world. The TEE acts as a power coprocessor from Linux PoV and we can keep the SCMI interface.

Trusted Substrate

Trusted Substrate project ambition is to upstream all necessary technologies in multiple projects to enable SystemReady compliance. Projects can be Trusted Firmware, OP-TEE, U-Boot, SCP, Linux kernel (EFI stub) and others.

Upstream Maintainership

Linaro's engineers are actively participating in upstream engineering communities. As a result, as maintainers, they become responsible for keeping their code upstream in sync with the overall development of respective upstream projects.

remoteproc/rpmsg Evolution

Advance and promote development related to the remoteproc and rpmsg kernel subsystems. More specifically identify features commonly sought after by the OpenAMP community and assist with their implementation.