Projects
These arm open source projects are only a subset of the leading edge Arm developments actively being worked on by Linaro, its member partners, and the open source community.
All Projects 
Artificial Intelligence 
Android Ecosystem 
Automotive 
IoT & Embedded 
Kernel & Toolchain 
OS Build & Test 
Trusted Substrate Linaro and collaborating members are working to bring best in class ML Inferencing & AI to the Arm ecosystem. This involves pushing experiences optimized for Arm on member hardware across a range of strategic AI projects.
Is Android a strategic OS for your company? Member companies and Linaro collaborate together with Google to improve the Android ecosystem. Our work is primarily in the Linux Kernel. By making decisions and coordinating the engineering activities together, the Android ecosystem is more healthy, this leads to improved development efficiency and better Android products.
The automotive industry is entering an exciting phase through the Software Defined Vehicle momentum, moving more and more away from hardware upgrades to software developments. But there is still a long way to go before the Software Defined Vehicle becomes a reality. Challenges still stand in the way such as the lack of standard interfaces and stringent requirements for communication latency of audio, video and sensor data, the need for secure communication between virtual machines and the ability to maintain up-to-date, secure software. All of these challenges have one thing in common - they all require collaborative software engineering to bring standardization and reference open source code bases to automotive. Without open standards the path to delivering the software defined vehicle will be a lot longer and more costly.
Linaro has a track record of bringing standardization to the Linux kernel and is now extending this to automotive. For more information, fill out the form below to get in touch or download our Whitepaper
As the 5th wave of computing (AI, IoT and 5G) quickly approaches, fragmentation in the Arm ecosystem is hindering the deployment of increasingly sophisticated devices. Linaro and Member companies are collaborating to integrate the latest security and most-up-to-date technologies for Arm-based IoT devices. Member companies benefit from Linaro’s expertise in testing as all RTOS platforms adopted are tested continuously to ensure secure deployment and high quality.
Kernel and toolchain technologies are essential to maintaining the health of software. We facilitate the access to maintainers, support regression testing, improve compiler technology and increase security across the Arm ecosystem.
Linaro and member companies collaborate to improve the quality of Operating System kernels (Linux, Android, Zephyr) by providing the software tools and processes to allow continuous build,functional testing and regression detection.
In addition, Linaro facilitates expanded testing coverage and higher software quality in various operating systems such as Linux, Android, and RTOSs.
Linaro has 10+ years experience working in the Arm embedded space and specialises in rapid deployment of automated testing.
Security is no longer an option, it’s a vital ingredient to be able to protect intellectual property, communications, bank accounts, personal digital belongings etc. The list is almost endless. To develop solutions that meet all the security criterias, you need to have a solid understanding of a vast range of technologies which requires teams of experts. Security has been an important topic for Linaro since the start. Linaro has built a strong team with security expertise and we have proven that we have been able to help other companies as well as communities to thrive. If you believe security is too challenging, we can help you!
Trusted Substrate is a BIOS that brings standards based secure booting and over-the-air (OTA) updates to the most trust demanding embedded computing projects such as automotive and robotics. OTA is a key value of Trusted Substrate as it allows any firmware components to be updated with anti-bricking and anti-roll back protections, and will allow transactional updates in asymmetric computing, Cortex-A + Cortex-M solutions.
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.
Project Homepage
https://linaro.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/GNU/overview
How to participate
Participation in this project can be achieved through Linaro Membership. The project is managed by TSC.
Visit the Linaro Membership page for more information.
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.
Project Homepage
https://linaro.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/LLVM/overview
How to participate
Participation in this project can be achieved through Linaro Membership. The project is managed by TSC.
Visit the Linaro Membership page for more information.
Primarily focused on Server Standardisation. Examples to include SBSA, xBBR to enable simplified adoption of mainline builds on new server hardware.
Project Homepage
https://linaro.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/ASA/overview
How to participate
Participation in this project can be achieved through Linaro Membership. The project is managed by LDCG SC.
Visit the Linaro Membership page for more information.
Project Homepage
https://linaro.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/EULR/overview
How to participate
Participation in this project can be achieved through Linaro Membership. The project is managed by TSC.
Visit the Linaro Membership page for more information.
The aim of this project is to make AArch64 a first class citizen in the Big Data, Analytics and Data Science community (e.g., Hadoop, Spark, etc.). Big Data and Data Science technologies are vital and have become mature with various production implementations. Linaro drives engineering activities and ARMv8 builds. for Apache Ambari, BigTop, Spark and Hadoop.
Project Homepage
https://linaro.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/BDDS/overview
How to participate
Participation in this project can be achieved through Linaro Membership. The project is managed by LDCG SC.
Visit the Linaro Membership page for more information.
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
Project Homepage
https://linaro.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/CLOUD/overview
How to participate
Participation in this project can be achieved through Linaro Membership. The project is managed by LDCG SC.
Visit the Linaro Membership page for more information.
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.
Project Homepage
https://linaro.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/QEMU/overview
How to participate
Participation in this project can be achieved through Linaro Membership. The project is managed by TSC.
Visit the Linaro Membership page for more information.
The goal is to remove the gaps with x86 by collaborating together in the Arm server ecosystem, so that we can provide competitive and leading storage solutions with Arm servers.
Deliverables are focused around:
- Participate in the upstream communities of Ceph/Lustre/BeeGFS/etc for ARM64 support, setup CI testing on Arm servers, and drive the official ARM64 releases;
- Performance optimizations by leveraging key ARM64 architecture features (storage related benchmark testing can be done for the profiling);
- Drive community promotion by members/partners together for storage solutions on Arm servers to help customer adoptions;
Project Homepage
How to participate
Participation in this project can be achieved through Linaro Membership. The project is managed by LDCG SC.
Visit the Linaro Membership page for more information.
- for *L*inaro *A*utomated *V*alidation *A*rchitecture.
Project Homepage
How to participate
Participation in this project can be achieved through Linaro Membership. The project is managed by TSC.
Visit the Linaro Membership page for more information.
Enable and maintain upstream kernels to work well with Android/AOSP.
Parts of this effort include regular testing of upstream kernels with AOSP and the creation of regression reports to the community, and then authoring fixes to specific issues to passing along to the correct community to take action.
Another area of effort is upstreaming functionality found in the Android Common Kernel, back into the mainline kernel. This makes it easier to test and validate upstream kernels with AOSP, as well as helps broaden the interest and use of functionality developed initially for android, and ensures the functionality continues to work and be maintained as part of the kernel stable ABI guarantee.
Some of the current ongoing areas of effort have been: GKI: Enabling and improving driver modularity and DMA BUF Heaps transition from ION.
Project Homepage
https://linaro.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/LI/overview
How to participate
Participation in this project can be achieved through Linaro Membership. The project is managed by LCG SC.
Visit the Linaro Membership page for more information.
Ensure and improve ongoing quality for 6 years Linux LTS releases, linux-next, and Linux mainline on the Arm architecture
Project Homepage
https://linaro.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/LKQ
How to participate
Participation in this project can be achieved through Linaro Membership. The project is managed by TSC.
Visit the Linaro Membership page for more information.
Project Homepage
https://linaro.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/CMSIS/overview
How to participate
Participation in this project can be achieved through Linaro Membership. The project is managed by LITE SC.
Visit the Linaro Membership page for more information.
The Optimize AI for Arm Data Center and Edge project is hosted out of the LDCG segment group. The project involves work within strategic frameworks that broadly empower HPC and AI computing. The effort involves simple enablement to optimized efforts to maximize performance.
h2. Scope
Data Center hardware powered by Arm designs could be found across the ecosystem. From the very high end Fukaku super computer, cloud computing, and other forms, these devices can be utilized for AI training and inference. These devices are often multi node, many cores, with or without specialized offload.
Edge device compares a wide variety of Cortex-A equipped hardware. These devices might be running Android, Linux and every other operating systems. Within this class of devices their capability to performance AI workloads such as inference can vary greatly. On the low end memory might be tight and no offload exists to on the high end, they can be server like with offload and plenty of resources. Indeed Edge devices since they are Cortex-A can have quite a bit in common with HPC/Server with the exception that one does not generally perform training on an edge device.
- frameworks*:
- frameworks*
Project Homepage
https://linaro.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/AIA/overview
How to participate
Participation in this project can be achieved through Linaro Membership. The project is managed by LDCG SC.
Visit the Linaro Membership page for more information.
Project Homepage
https://linaro.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/AIM/overview
How to participate
Participation in this project can be achieved through Linaro Membership. The project is managed by TSC.
Visit the Linaro Membership page for more information.
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.
Project Homepage
https://linaro.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/PERF/overview
How to participate
Participation in this project can be achieved through Linaro Membership. The project is managed by TSC.
Visit the Linaro Membership page for more information.
SQUAD is a Software Quality Dashboard written in Python 3. It uses Django.
See the documentation folder for more documentation, or go browse the documentation online
Project Homepage
https://github.com/linaro/squad
How to participate
Participation in this project can be achieved through Linaro Membership. The project is managed by TSC.
Visit the Linaro Membership page for more information.
Hardware with good software support, such as 96Boards, is a critical tool both for testing and validation of the latest AOSP and latest stable and upstream kernels, but also key for prototyping both new hardware and software.
While, with the Google Pixel Phones, there are a number of form-factor devices which are supported in AOSP, those devices are (for the most part) locked to a specific vendor BSP kernel. Given the time required to go from early bringup to shipping a product, the kernel supported by the form factor devices are always one and a half to two years old by the time they ship. This means these devices have little value for testing the current upstream kernel, and each device is really only useful for testing updates to the -stable kernel release it shipped with. This makes them less than ideal for developing any functionality that can be pushed upstream into the mainline kernel.
Additionally, because the form-factor devices are enclosed, there is little ability to prototype hardware that didn’t ship on the device.
Hardware with a well implemented software stack integrated into AOSP is able to solve both of these issues, as we prioritize devices that are close to upstream and continually push to upstream any board specific patches needed, so we are able to always move forward to newer kernels and continue to support a wide array of stable kernels.
This allows us to quickly find and report regressions that come up in the mainline or -stable branches that might affect Android/AOSP.
Also hardware in the form of developer boards (devboards) are useful platforms for developing new functionality. The DMABUF Heaps interface, which replaces ION in future kernels, was prototyped and validated on the AOSP devboards, allowing us to confidently know that the patches we were submitting upstream would work well with Android. Additionally, initial prototyping of Google’s GKI effort was done on AOSP devboards, in order to work out issues and to minimize issues that vendors might run into and slow product shipping. Google developers have also used these boards to validate changes such as filesystem and UFS crypto changes that they were pushing upstream. This is much better than having to develop in Android against an older device kernel and then forward porting the patch to the latest upstream kernel and, having no other way to validate it, hoping it works properly when it makes it upstream.
Since the devboards have a wider array of expansion ports that often can be used to prototype and validate new hardware designs that are targeting Android, making it easier for vendors to validate their kernel drivers and Android HALs against the latest mainline kernels and AOSP userland.
Project Homepage
https://linaro.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/SDEFAU/overview
How to participate
Participation in this project can be achieved through Linaro Membership. The project is managed by LCG SC.
Visit the Linaro Membership page for more information.
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
Project Homepage
https://linaro.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/STR/overview
How to participate
Participation in this project can be achieved through Linaro Membership. The project is managed by TSC.
Visit the Linaro Membership page for more information.
Related Posts
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.
Project Homepage
https://linaro.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/SCMI/overview
How to participate
Participation in this project can be achieved through Linaro Membership. The project is managed by TSC.
Visit the Linaro Membership page for more information.
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.
Trusted Substrate is a BIOS that brings standards based secure booting and over-the-air (OTA) updates to the most trust demanding embedded computing projects such as automotive and robotics. OTA is a key value of Trusted Substrate as it allows any firmware components to be updated with anti-bricking and anti-roll back protections, and will allow transactional updates in asymmetric computing, Cortex-A + Cortex-M solutions.
Project Homepage
https://linaro.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/TS/overview
How to participate
Participation in this project can be achieved through Linaro Membership. The project is managed by LEDGE SC.
Visit the Linaro Membership page for more information.
TuxSuite™ delivers on-demand APIs and tools for building Linux kernels in parallel and at scale.
Project Homepage
How to participate
Participation in this project can be achieved through Linaro Membership. The project is managed by TSC.
Visit the Linaro Membership page for more information.
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.
Project Homepage
https://linaro.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/UM/overview
How to participate
Participation in this project can be achieved through Linaro Membership. The project is managed by TSC.
Visit the Linaro Membership page for more information.