Freescale Semiconductor, IBM, Samsung, ST-Ericsson, and Texas Instruments have teamed up to establish Linaro, a not-for-profit open-source software engineering company dedicated to enhancing open-source innovation for the next wave of always-connected, always-on computing. According to the founders, Linaro will help developers and manufacturers provide companies with more choice, more responsive devices, and move diverse applications on Linux-based systems.

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Linaro’s aim is to accelerate innovation among Linux developers on the most advanced semiconductor systems-on-a-chip (SoCs). Current devices require complex SoCs to achieve the high performance and low power that consumers demand. Linaro was formed to increase investment in open source, address the challenges in developing products for sophisticated consumer markets, and support a broad array of semiconductor products from multiple companies. By providing the common foundations of tools and software for other distributions and stacks to build upon, Linaro hopes to enable greater operational efficiency for the electronics industry.

The Linux and open-source software communities traditionally have focused on solving the software problems of enterprise and computing markets with a limited choice of processor platforms. The open-source community is transitioning to create advanced Web-centric consumer devices using high-profile open-source-based distributions and a range of high-performance, low-power ARM-based SoCs. Linaro hopes to make it easier and quicker to develop advanced products with these high-profile distributions by creating software commonality across semiconductor SoCs from multiple companies.

In addition to providing a focal point for open-source software developers, the companies claim, Linaro will benefit consumers. Its outputs will be designed to accelerate the abundance of new consumer products that use Linux-based distributions such as Android, LiMo, MeeGo, Ubuntu, and webOS in conjunction with advanced semiconductor SoCs to provide the new features consumers desire at the lowest possible power consumption.

Linaro plans to work with the growing number of Linux distributions to create regular releases of optimized tools and foundation software that can be used widely by the industry, increasing compatibility across semiconductors from multiple suppliers. As a result, its resources and open-source solutions will be designed to allow device manufacturers to accelerate development time, improve performance, and reduce engineering time spent on differentiating, low-level software.

Linux distributions, open-source, and proprietary software projects also may benefit, with more stable code becoming widely available as a common base for innovation. Further, Linaro aims to unite the open-source engineering resources within its member firms with the broad open-source community. Linaro engineers will be expected to contribute to a wide range of open-source projects covering such areas as tools, kernel, graphics, and boot code.

Linaro intends to work in partnership with the Linux Foundation to align on core operating principles as well. Freescale, Samsung, ST-Ericsson, and Texas Instruments will align their open-source engineering efforts within Linaro, in addition to ARM and IBM. Planned for November 2010, Linaro’s first release will provide performance optimizations for SoCs based on the ARM Cortex-A processor family.

Linaro