Silicon Vendors Form Linaro to Promote Linux Devices

Leading siicon vendors, including ARM, Freescale Semiconductor, IBM, Samsung, ST-Ericsson and Texas Instruments, have formed a not-for-profit open source software engineering company called "Linaro" to promote open source innovation for the next wave of always-connected, always-on computing. Linaro's mission is to significantly simplify the process of bringing Linux-based consumer devices to market.


The founders said Linaro was formed "to increase investment in open source, address the challenges in developing products for sophisticated consumer markets and provide the support of a broad array of semiconductor products from multiple companies." By providing the common foundations of tools and software for other distributions and stacks to build upon, Linaro will enable greater operational efficiency for the electronics industry. The goal is to accelerate the abundance of new consumer products that use Linux-based distributions such as Android, LiMo, MeeGo, Ubuntu and webOS in conjunction with advanced semiconductor SoCs to provide the new features consumers desire at the lowest possible power consumption.


"The dramatic growth of open source software development can now be seen in internet-based, always-connected mobile and consumer products," said Tom Lantzsch, executive officer, Linaro. "Linaro will help accelerate this trend further by increasing investment on key open source projects and providing industry alignment with the community to deliver the best Linux-based products for the benefit of the consumer."


The company's first release is planned for November 2010 and will provide performance optimizations for SoCs based on the ARM Cortex™-A processor family.


In addition to ARM and IBM, four of the world's leading application processor companies, Freescale, Samsung, ST-Ericsson and Texas Instruments, will align open source engineering efforts within Linaro.
http://www.linaro.org