Linaro seeks to simplify ARM Linux landscape
The ARM processor family is a complicated one, with many different variations, leading to large numbers of separate sub-architectures in the Linux kernel. A quick glance at the ARM directory in a recent kernel tree shows nearly 70 different sub-architectures, each corresponding to a different CPU or system-on-chip (SoC). That complexity has made it harder to develop new products for new or existing ARM devices. A new organization that was formed by six silicon vendors, Linaro, seeks to simplify that landscape, and allow easier—faster—development of ARM-Linux-based products.
Linaro was announced on June
3 as a non-profit company founded by ARM, Freescale, IBM, Samsung,
ST-Ericsson, and Texas Instruments that intends to "provide a
stable and optimized base for distributions and developers by creating new
releases of optimized tools, kernel and middleware software validated for a
wide range of SoCs, every six months.
" That six-month schedule
aligns with Ubuntu's—the first release is due in November, one month
after Ubuntu 10.10—and Canonical will be heavily involved in the effort.
Linaro already has a project in
Launchpad, Canonical's software collaboration platform, and it will
seemingly take the place of Ubuntu-ARM.
The focus will be on the low-level plumbing for ARM-based systems: the kernel, development tools, boot loaders, and graphics. The Linaro FAQ and other pages on the web site make it clear that Linaro is not planning on creating a new distribution. It is, instead, pitching in on upstream projects to simplify and optimize for ARM systems. It is not a new distribution, but clearly the hope is that various distributions will adopt the Linaro contributions.
The company lists current mobile distributions as potential benefactors of its efforts. Android, MeeGo, LiMo, and Ubuntu are specifically mentioned as mobile ARM distributions that might benefit from the work Linaro is planning to do. Because the work will be done in conjunction with the upstream projects, any other existing or new distribution can also make use of the improvements.
In addition, Linaro touts its benefits to consumers. By reducing the
complexity for device makers, it will be "enabling exciting
innovative products to come to the market quicker
". Focusing on
power consumption will also result in devices that "have longer
battery lives or slimmer cooler designs
". Linaro clearly wants to
maintain—increase—the level of ARM adoption in mobile devices.
Linaro will be well-funded, with a budget said to be tens of millions of dollars, much of which will pay for 80 employees. There are several levels of membership in Linaro, with two paying classes, Core and Club, which each provide money and engineers to the organization. For small organizations or individual contributors, there is the free Community Member class. There is a rather elaborate organizational structure that governs the company, as well as a management team in place. Based on all of that, it seems clear that Linaro wasn't just thrown together quickly, but has been in the works for some time.
There are already specific plans for what will be contained in the upcoming release. Canonical's Linaro release manager, Jamie Bennett, looks at the plan for Linaro 10.11 on his blog. There he also provides some more detail on the fragmentation in the Linux ARM world that led to the formation of Linaro:
That something is laid out in a detailed release document on the wiki. The tasks are broken up into four areas: Kernel, Graphics and User Experience, QA and Validation, and Infrastructure, with Linaro-specific as well as related Ubuntu tasks listed. Using device trees to describe different ARM hardware, which could reduce the complexity of configuring Linux for the platform, is high on the list. While some ARM hackers are not sold on device trees, a recent linux-kernel discussion about the proliferation of ARM configurations would indicate that Linus Torvalds, at least, is interested in seeing some kind of complexity reduction for that architecture. If Linaro can work with the upstream kernel developers to find a solution—device trees or something else—to that problem, it will have accomplished much.
There are other things on the agenda for the 10.11 release including
standardizing and unifying the telephony stack for the platform, making Qt
fully functional on ARM, optimizing web browsers for the architecture, and
selecting the "best toolchain for ARM hardware
". Overall, the
list of planned achievements for the five months before the release is
quite ambitious. Whether all that can be completed by a brand new
organization—even with a great deal of Canonical
know-how—remains to be seen. In the end, even completing a big chunk of it would
be quite an accomplishment; presumably there will be 11.05 and further
releases to fill in any gaps.
In many ways, Linaro is further proof that Linux is winning the battle for which OS will run on consumer electronics and other embedded devices. ARM chips are the dominant embedded Linux platform these days, but Intel has been targeting the low-power arena with its Atom processors. Linaro certainly looks like an effort to ensure that ARM-based devices maintain their lead in the embedded Linux world. It should be an interesting battle to watch.
Linaro seeks to simplify ARM Linux landscape
Posted Jun 9, 2010 14:35 UTC (Wed)
by njd27 (subscriber, #5770)
[Link]
Posted Jun 9, 2010 14:35 UTC (Wed) by njd27 (subscriber, #5770) [Link]
Linaro seeks to simplify ARM Linux landscape
Posted Jun 9, 2010 20:24 UTC (Wed)
by drag (guest, #31333)
[Link] (3 responses)
Posted Jun 9, 2010 20:24 UTC (Wed) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (3 responses)
Linaro seeks to simplify ARM Linux landscape
Posted Jun 9, 2010 20:44 UTC (Wed)
by cesarb (subscriber, #6266)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Jun 9, 2010 20:44 UTC (Wed) by cesarb (subscriber, #6266) [Link] (2 responses)
Linaro seeks to simplify ARM Linux landscape
Posted Jun 9, 2010 21:10 UTC (Wed)
by drag (guest, #31333)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Jun 9, 2010 21:10 UTC (Wed) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (1 responses)
ARM systems don't have BIOSes like x86 does. Unlike in x86 were you depend on the BIOS to initialize storage and read the master boot record to read and execute the bootloader the bootloader for ARM systems is usually largely responsible for getting the processor/memory/flash/storage deviecs initialized and read to accept the OS kernel.
This means that for ARM, if they get good standards going, can completely avoid the messes that have happened with the Microsoft/Intel-style technologies like ACPI.
The biggest win would be, of course, if they can get the graphics situation under control. With x86 you have reversed engineered Nvidia drivers, open source (and vendor assisting) drivers for Intel and ATI. Right now ARM is basically all-proprietary.
Linaro seeks to simplify ARM Linux landscape
Posted Jun 10, 2010 11:28 UTC (Thu)
by marcH (subscriber, #57642)
[Link]
Posted Jun 10, 2010 11:28 UTC (Thu) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]
I would greatly appreciate if Intel could stop "assisting" for a little while. So every distribution upgrade stops feeling like a downgrade.
Linaro seeks to simplify ARM Linux landscape
Posted Jun 9, 2010 21:11 UTC (Wed)
by mdz@debian.org (guest, #14112)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Jun 9, 2010 21:11 UTC (Wed) by mdz@debian.org (guest, #14112) [Link] (1 responses)
Linaro seeks to simplify ARM Linux landscape
Posted Jun 10, 2010 11:10 UTC (Thu)
by ulissesf (subscriber, #57772)
[Link]
Posted Jun 10, 2010 11:10 UTC (Thu) by ulissesf (subscriber, #57772) [Link]
Linaro seeks to simplify ARM Linux landscape
Posted Jun 10, 2010 3:48 UTC (Thu)
by lfelipe (guest, #50478)
[Link]
Posted Jun 10, 2010 3:48 UTC (Thu) by lfelipe (guest, #50478) [Link]
Also, does someone have more info on where the 80 employees number is coming from? As an outsider with a great deal of interest on ARM, I tried searching quite a bit about how exactly the infrastructure for this is being laid out, but so far haven't been able to find much, most probably because it's still quite new and I expect that after the dust has settled this will be fixed.
Linaro seeks to simplify ARM Linux landscape
Posted Jun 10, 2010 7:43 UTC (Thu)
by JamieBennett (guest, #25846)
[Link]
Posted Jun 10, 2010 7:43 UTC (Thu) by JamieBennett (guest, #25846) [Link]
Linaro seeks to simplify ARM Linux landscape
Posted Jun 10, 2010 23:55 UTC (Thu)
by achiang (guest, #47297)
[Link] (5 responses)
Posted Jun 10, 2010 23:55 UTC (Thu) by achiang (guest, #47297) [Link] (5 responses)
"The Linaro FAQ make[s] it clear that Linaro is not planning on creating a new distribution [...] instead, pitching in on upstream projects to simplify and optimize for ARM systems."
Hopefully this effort will help put to bed the meme that Canonical do not contribute upstream. There's real wood ("tens of millions of dollars") behind this arrow.
/ac, Canonical employee, but not associated with Linaro
Linaro seeks to simplify ARM Linux landscape
Posted Jun 11, 2010 1:15 UTC (Fri)
by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639)
[Link] (4 responses)
Posted Jun 11, 2010 1:15 UTC (Fri) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link] (4 responses)
Regardless, I look forward to seeing Canonical moving up in the kernel contribution statistic reports in a verifiable commitment to upstreaming the ARM improvements. Canonical can certainly talk the talk. I'm not sure there's much in the way of demonstrative evidence that as an organization they walk the walk often enough.
-jef
Linaro seeks to simplify ARM Linux landscape
Posted Jun 11, 2010 2:26 UTC (Fri)
by achiang (guest, #47297)
[Link] (3 responses)
Posted Jun 11, 2010 2:26 UTC (Fri) by achiang (guest, #47297) [Link] (3 responses)
Of course I wouldn't reveal private information [financial or otherwise], even if I was privy to it [which I'm not]. Whatever's public is public.
The kernel is obviously not the only upstream project in the world. I think we both realize that.
It's your privilege to hold whatever biases you like, and voice them in whichever manner of tone pleases you. It's my privilege to go look for more productive conversations.
cheers,
/ac
Linaro seeks to simplify ARM Linux landscape
Posted Jun 11, 2010 3:53 UTC (Fri)
by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Jun 11, 2010 3:53 UTC (Fri) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link] (1 responses)
Yes we are both able to be biased. I however am willing to look past bias at focus on verifiable fact. You went to all the trouble to allude that the millions of dollars going into Linaro are Canonical's dollars, and an as such are adequate substitute for actual engineering work. You might was well go the extra step and provide authoritative references which back up your opinion.
-jef
Linaro seeks to simplify ARM Linux landscape
Posted Jun 13, 2010 1:22 UTC (Sun)
by cjwatson (subscriber, #7322)
[Link]
Posted Jun 13, 2010 1:22 UTC (Sun) by cjwatson (subscriber, #7322) [Link]
Linaro seeks to simplify ARM Linux landscape
Posted Jun 14, 2010 9:55 UTC (Mon)
by nye (guest, #51576)
[Link]
Posted Jun 14, 2010 9:55 UTC (Mon) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]
Linaro seeks to simplify ARM Linux landscape
Posted Jun 12, 2010 17:50 UTC (Sat)
by The_Barbarian (guest, #48152)
[Link]
Posted Jun 12, 2010 17:50 UTC (Sat) by The_Barbarian (guest, #48152) [Link]
I hope this includes oFono, and, dare we dream, OsmocomBB.
Bug tracking and source repository
Posted Jun 24, 2010 6:44 UTC (Thu)
by tdwebste (guest, #18154)
[Link]
Posted Jun 24, 2010 6:44 UTC (Thu) by tdwebste (guest, #18154) [Link]
Which will Debian bts or Launchpad bts be the primary bts to which relates to others bts "via bts-link I assume"?