Congratulations to Team Linaro on their first full release yesterday. For those not yet in the know, Linaro is a collaborative forum with dedicated engineers making sure that Linux rocks on ARM (and potentially other architectures). Staffed by a combination of Canonical and new Linaro engineers, together with secondees from the major ARM silicon vendors, it’s solving the problems of fragmentation in Linux across that ecosystem and reducing the time to market for ARM devices.

Linaro uses the same cadence as Ubuntu and we’re able to collaborate on the selection, integration and debugging of key components like the kernel, toolchain, X.org (still ;-)), and hundreds of small-but-important libraries and tools in between. Team Linaro was @UDS and it was very cool to see the extent to which their sessions drew attendance from the wider Ubuntu community – I think there’s a growing interest in efficient computing across the Ubuntu landscape.

The Linaro team is pleased to announce the release of Linaro 10.11.

10.11 is the first public release that brings together the huge amount

of engineering effort that has occurred within Linaro over the past 6

months. In addition to officially supporting the TI OMAP3 (Beagle

Board and Beagle Board XM) and ARM Versatile Express platforms, the

images have been tested and verified on a total of 7 different platforms

including TI OMAP4 Panda Board, IGEPv2, Freescale iMX51 and ST-E U8500. The advances that have happened in this cycle are numerous but include a

completely rebuilt archive using GCC 4.4.4 and the latest ARM optimised

tool chain, the Linux kernel version 2.6.35, support for

cross-compiling, a new hardware pack way of building images, 3D

acceleration improvements, u-boot enhancements and initial device tree

support, a new QA tracking structure, the list goes on.

Android in the house

The road ahead looks even more interesting. For the next cycle, the Linaro team is going to build an Android environment on the same kernel and toolchain that we collaborate on with Ubuntu. For folks building devices, picking a board that’s part of the Linaro process means you’ll be able to get either an Ubuntu-style or Android-style core environment up and running at Day 1, which should reduce time to market for everyone.

If the Linaro team pulls this off, it will mean that Linaro provides an intersection point for the majority of the consumer electronics x86 and ARM ecosystem, regardless of the end OS. I’m sure over time we’ll find more groups that are interested in joining the process, and I see no reason why they couldn’t be accommodated in this cadence-driven model.

More players, more diversity in services

It was also good to see folks from Montavista and Mentor at Linaro@UDS this year. Whether the Linaro kernel and toolchain plug into their own distros, or they start to offer their services around the Linaro/Ubuntu/Android BSP’s, the result is a healthier ecosystem with fewer snags and gotchas for device makers.

One group asked me explicitly if Linaro was a Canonical show, and I was glad to say it isn’t. Canonical can’t possibly do everything that embedded Linux needs done, but our competence in cadence and release management makes us good custodians of a public project, which is what we do with Ubuntu itself. Participation and collaboration are at the heart, and they benefit from being partnered with a commitment to delivery and deadlines. We can’t do everything in a single cycle, but we can provide a roadmap for things like kernel defragmentation, the device-tree work, enablement of an ever-increasing cross-section of the ARM ecosystem, and transitions between versions of GCC or Python or X or even Wayland. So Canonical makes a good anchor, but Linaro has room for lots of other service-providers. Having multiple companies participate in Linaro means that the products we’re all shipping get better, faster.

Testing

The Linaro team is also going to focus on repeatable, rigorous testing of the core platform in the next cycle. That harmonises nicely with our growing focus on quality in Ubuntu, and the need for better quality and testing in open source in general. I’m interested to see what tools and results the Linaro team can produce in the next six months. Open source *can* be bulletproof, but it can also degrade in quality if we don’t put the right processes in place upstream and downstream, so this is a very welcome initiative.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 11th, 2010 at 2:47 pm and is filed under free software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.