A group of hardware companies have formed a new nonprofit organization called Linaro with the aim of funding collaborative mobile Linux development. The group is building a mobile technology stack that could potentially reduce the complexity of building ARM-powered mobile devices with the open-source Linux operating system.
I imagine that many of the Linux enthusiasts who are reading this article are groaning in frustration and preparing to post comments in the discussion thread to complain about the endless proliferation of ill-conceived mobile Linux consortia and vaguely-defined middleware initiatives. I can sympathize, because that was my initial reaction when I read the press release. Fortunately, it's not as bad as it sounds.
The group appears to be focused on tooling and hardware enablement, meaning that its contributions will benefit existing mobile middleware projects that operate higher up in the Linux stack. Linaro's chief goal is to reduce the time that it takes to bring a new ARM-powered product to market with Linux. This effort is largely neutral with respect to what software environment and components individual vendors choose to run in user space.
Linaro will not compete with existing platforms such as MeeGo and Android. Instead, it will attempt to improve the shared underlying software components that allow those platforms and others to run on ARM SoCs. In principle, this could actually reduce fragmentation at the lower levels of the Linux stack. The group's members include ARM, IBM, Freescale, TI, Ericsson, Samsung, and Canonical. The hardware companies, which are going to supply financial backing for Linaro's development efforts, say that the nonprofit organization will have an annual budget in the tens of millions of dollars.
Although there aren't a lot of technical details yet, Linaro has established a governance model and has defined working groups that will focus on specific areas, including tooling improvements, kernel consolidation, and mobile middleware. The organization will have a board of directors, a management team, and a technical steering committee to guide its efforts. All of the code that is developed within the scope of Linaro's working groups will be made available under open source software licenses so that it can be widely used.
Linaro is closely aligned with Ubuntu's Linux on ARM initiative. Many elements of the Linaro project will be managed through Canonical's Launchpad collaboration platform, though a lot of the code will be managed and contributed upstream. Much like Ubuntu, the Linaro project will adhere to a six-month, time-based release cycle. This will allow for rapid iteration and predictability.
Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth discussed certain aspects of Linaro in a blog entry that was published Thursday. He views the project as a win for consistency and a constructive way to reduce fragmentation without eroding the diversity of the mobile Linux ecosystem.
"The ARM platform has historically been superspecialized and hence fragmented—multiple different ARM-based CPU's from multiple different ARM silicon partners all behaved differently enough that one needed to develop different software for each of them," he wrote. "Boot loaders, toolchains, kernels, drivers and middleware are all fragmented today, and of course there's additional fragmentation associated with Android vs mainline on ARM, but Linaro will go a long way towards cleaning this up and making it possible to deliver a consistent platform experience across all of the major ARM hardware providers."
Linux is increasingly seeing adoption by major hardware vendors on mobile and embedded devices, a trend that led Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin to speculate last year that Linux would eventually become the dominant operating system for consumer electronics devices. It makes perfect sense for the major ARM stakeholders to work together to improve the open source operating system.
reader comments
17