Linaro Second Engineering Cycle Highlights

This blog was initially posted on 27th April 2011 on blogs.arm.com

As we come to the end of our second engineering cycle, I thought it would be interesting to highlight 4 of the initiatives happening in Linaro that I believe are having the biggest impact on how we are demonstrating Linaro delivering on its initial mandate.

• Linaro Evaluation Builds (LEBs): We’ve had an almost universally positive reaction to the initiative we started this year – to deliver evaluation builds of popular OSS distributions on our Member’s hardware. Our initial targets are Android and Ubuntu. The LEBs provide an integration point for Linaro Working Group developments, delivered on a set of reference platforms for the relevant OS. LEBs were created to make it easier for companies producing distributions or vertically integrated open source stacks to adopt Linaro software, reduce time to market for our Members through streamlined integration and validation of our Landing Team efforts, and mediate the flow of innovation between Linaro and their engineering teams
• Landing Teams: All Linaro Silicon Partner Members now have “Landing Teams” up and running – a service offered by Linaro where a small team works exclusively with the Member’s existing BSP engineers. Their focus is to ensure that when launching new hardware platforms the latest Linaro and upstream code works. An exciting aspect is we are seeing Linaro and the Landing Teams in particular acting as the catalyst for change inside the organisations as they work out the best ways of engaging with the open source community and using the latest upstream contributions.
• Linaro Showcase: At our planning summit in May, we’ll be showcasing some of the best work delivered out of the various Linaro teams to date. We’ll also have demos of our Member’s hardware running Linaro software as well as Community demos. What I’m particularly looking forward to here is seeing how TI,  Freescale, ST-E, Samsung, ARM and IBM engineers have been working collaboratively to deliver major advances in Linux OSS on ARM.
• http://status.linaro.org: Widely acclaimed inside and outside Linaro, this provides an always up-to-date status report of every Linaro requirement we are working on in the current engineering cycle. What users particularly like about this report is you can drill right down from a high level summary of the requirement to the detailed work item every engineer is working on that day

As we deliver on our mandate and demonstrate the output, we are seeing continuing depth of engagement from our Members in Linaro. Coupled with this, we are also seeing increasing involvement from the wider community, and a number of important OSS companies and individuals are now involved in Linaro – expect to see further announcements in this area soon. Finally, other silicon vendors are watching Linaro with interest, as they see the value the current Members are deriving.

We’re an organisation that is growing in influence and stature. When we launched, it was a small team of 25 engineers backed by blue chip investors. As we approach our one year anniversary, that team has grown to over 100 engineers with a rapidly increasing ecosystem and highly productive output.

Linaro™ is a Not For Profit (NFP) software engineering company that works with the open source community to make it easier and faster to develop open source based devices. Linaro has the aim of investing new resources and aligning efforts from the industry to continuously improve and optimize open source software and tools on the ARM architecture with the goal of accelerating industry innovation.

Stephen Doel, Chief Operations Officer for Linaro. Stephen has over 15 years experience delivering complex electronics and mobile products to end customers. A particular aspect he has enjoyed over his career has been the variety, from setting up manufacturing lines for new products, rolling out national telecoms infrastructure, to integrating new products from acquisition and delivering major software suites to market. In his most recent role at ARM he has been managing the operations of the Office of the CTO.