Thursday, May 23, 2013

Linaro expands its open source collaboration model with the new Enterprise and Networking groups

by Andrea Gallo (Linaro)

Thursday, 23.05.2013, New York III, 10:00-10:45 Uhr

Linaro is a not-for-profit engineering organization with over 120 engineers working on consolidating and optimizing open source software for the ARM architecture, including the GCC toolchain, the Linux kernel, ARM power management, graphics and multimedia interfaces.

Linaro was established in June 2010 by founding members ARM, Freescale, IBM, Samsung, ST-Ericsson and Texas instruments (TI). Members provide engineering resources and funding. Linaro's goals are to deliver value to its members through enabling their engineering teams to focus on differentiation and product delivery, and to reduce time to market for OEM/ODMs delivering open source based products using ARM technology.

To ensure commercial quality software, Linaro's work includes comprehensive test and validation on member hardware platforms. The full scope of Linaro's engineering work is open to all online. Open engineering has been practised from the start at Linaro with plans, specifications and progress available for inspection on the developer wiki.

Linaro is distribution neutral: it wants to provide the best software foundations to everyone, and to reduce non-differentiating and costly low level fragmentation.

Linaro's key value is in working on generic ARM technology that is common to all ARM SoC vendors. In this way engineering costs are shared, rather than each vendor having to implement core software technology themselves, which has resulted in fragmentation and overhead in maintaining code that cannot be upstreamed to the mainline Linux kernel and other open source projects. Linaro's output is used by its members, and by distributions including Android, Ubuntu and OEM/ODM customized versions of Linux. In addition to sharing development costs, Linaro reduces the cost of maintenance for members with its focus on upstreaming into key open source projects including GCC and Kernel.org, and the implementation of standards, such as DeviceTree, which reduce the amount of work involved in bringing up multiple platforms.

In addition to the core activities for its Club and Core members, Linaro has recently introduced a new membership scheme with the newly created Enterprise and Networking groups.

While so far the founding members have been mainly silicon vendors designing and producing innovative ARM-based products, with this new group membership Linaro is targeting the wider ecosystem around the specific market segments of the new coming ARM servers and networking infrastructure. This includes commercial distribution vendors, OEM's and service / content providers.

The talk will explain how the governance works for both the core Linaro activities and the group specific ones, will describe the latest achievements in the various sub-teams, the mid-term roadmap and the resources available to all community developers to get involved and contribute.

About the author Andrea Gallo:

Andrea Gallo is the Director of the Linaro Enterprise Group.

Prior to this Andrea was very much involved with Linaro as part of the Technical Steering Committee representing ST-Ericsson as a Fellow and Chief Architect.

Andrea joined STMicroelectronics in 1995 and covered many roles and products, including the world first dial-up 56kbps USB Pegas.usB softmodem in 1998, the world first ADSL USB/PCI controllerless modem in 2000 and many products and prototypes based on ST Nomadik Application Processor.

Andrea set up and managed STM Linux Software Platform team in Bangalore, including recruitment and software engineering process, and then moved into ST-Ericsson when the JV between ST and Ericsson Mobile Platform was created.

As a teenager, Andrea wrote software in Basic, Z80 and ARM assembler and C published by English and Italian magazines and Public Domain Libraries and also attended two summer time trainee programs in July 1987 and 1988 at Acorn Computers in Cambridge (UK) on the just released ARM2 processor, few years before the creation of ARM Ltd itself.