At the LinuxCon Europe event today in Prague, the Linux Foundation announced plans to launch a new kernel tree aimed at providing long-term support for device vendors. The project, which is called the Long Term Stable Kernel Initiative (LTSI), could reduce the cost of producing a custom Linux-based platform for a mobile or embedded system.

LTSI emerged from the Linux Foundation's consumer electronics workgroup. It will be hosted by the Linux Foundation, which will coordinate the development effort in collaboration with participants from the industry. The project has attracted a number of major hardware manufacturers, including Hitachi, LG, Panasonic, Sony, and Toshiba.

The chief goal of LTSI is to produce stable kernel releases that can be used reliably for the two- to three-year lifespan of a consumer electronics product. A new LTSI kernel release will be issued annually and will receive regular updates for a duration of two years.

The idea behind the project is that it will give consumer electronics vendors an upstream environment in which to collaborate on a longer-lasting kernel with backported features and fixes, reducing the cost and development overhead of each vendor having to maintain its own custom kernel tree. The Linux Foundation hopes that the project will help significantly reduce the number of divergent custom kernel trees by giving the industry a solid base on which to work.

"The CE industry has leveraged Linux to reduce costs and speed time to market. Now they are taking the next step to reduce the costly duplication of effort at work maintaining custom kernels," Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin said in a statement. "LTSI is an important effort because it will allow vendors to share the work of maintaining a common kernel for the consumer electronics industry, resulting in more use of Linux in the industry and increasing contributions from CE makers to the advancement of Linux."

The Linux Foundation has a mixed track record on shepherding mobile initiatives. The MeeGo project, which the Linux Foundation was coordinating in collaboration with Intel and Nokia, dramatically imploded earlier this year when Nokia gave up on the platform and adopted Microsoft's Windows Phone 7.

The MeeGo project was rebooted and replaced with a new Linux-based platform called Tizen. The sudden pivot, which was executed without community involvement or feedback, left independent MeeGo contributors feeling disenfranchised. The whole ordeal hasn't been very good for the Linux Foundation's credibility. It's worth noting, however, that the Linux Foundation has been responsive to meeting the real-world needs of hardware vendors in the wake of MeeGo's decline.

At a MeeGo conference last year in Dublin, we saw a lot of interest from hardware vendors in consuming the lower levels of the MeeGo stack. They wanted to provide their own custom user experience rather than committing to a standard userspace environment with a unified application ecosystem. Their interest in MeeGo was motivated mostly by the tools that the project offered for reducing time to market and accelerating the development of a custom embedded Linux platform.

A separate Linux Foundation project called Yocto was formed after MeeGo to meet exactly that need—it provides tooling and infrastructure for building custom embedded Linux platforms. Unlike MeeGo and Tizen, isn't itself a distribution and doesn't seek to standardize the upper layers of the stack. Yocto, which is now roughly a year old, announced the release of version 1.1 this week. The Linux Foundation also announced that Yocto will be taking over maintainership of the Embedded GNU C Library, a glibc variant designed for embedded systems.

Compared to the failed MeeGo platform, efforts like LTSI and Yocto represent a more pragmatic approach to serving the technical needs of hardware vendors that rely on Linux. These projects are less ambitious and don't reach as high up in the stack, which makes them better suited to accommodating the industry's approach to product differentiation.

Listing image by Photograph by Arthur Chapman