[Santa Clara, US; 1 November 2012] Linaro, the not-for-profit engineering organization developing open source software for the ARM architecture, announced today the formation of the Linaro Enterprise Group (LEG) and the addition of AMD, Applied Micro Circuits Corporation, Calxeda, Canonical, Cavium, Facebook, HP, Marvell and Red Hat as Linaro members.
With significant market interest in energy-efficient ARM-based servers, industry leaders have joined together through Linaro, creating LEG, to collaborate and accelerate the development of foundational software for ARM Server Linux. LEG benefits have broad industry implications, including time to market acceleration, lower development costs, and access to innovative and differentiated systems, fundamental to the ARM ecosystem.
The new LEG members have joined existing Linaro members ARM, Samsung and ST-Ericsson to create a shared software engineering team and steering committee. The team will build on Linaro’s experience of bringing competing companies together to work on common solutions and enable OEMs, commercial Linux providers and System on a Chip (SoC) vendors to collaborate in a neutral environment on the development and optimization of the core software needed by the rapidly emerging market for low-power hyperscale servers.
Speaking at ARM’s largest annual developer conference, TechCon, ARM CEO Warren East said “The significance of key industry players coming together like this to develop new aspects of the ecosystem is showing the transformational position the industry is now in. As power and energy become increasing costs to business, there continues to be a need to drive down costs and this means a total reinvention of the server space. There will be a range of server solutions based on ARM technology as the entire business community looks to reduce cost of ownership and achieve energy efficiency. Ultimately, it is the partnership approach which is vital to encourage innovation in this space and we are delighted to see LEG shares this vision. By changing the way we process data, the opportunity for a smarter, more connected future can be truly realized.” Concurrently, at the Linaro Connect event in Copenhagen, the LEG engineering team is engaged in face-to face meetings as part of Linaro’s regular engineering conference at which over 300 engineers from more than 80 companies have been defining the future of Linux on ARM.
“Linaro is building a high-quality software engineering team that is working with our members on the development of key enabling software for the new generation of low-power, high-performance, hyperscale servers,” said George Grey, CEO of Linaro, “We are especially pleased with the broad industry support and to be working with commercial Linux providers and OEMs in addition to SoC vendors to ensure that we meet the requirements of all members of the ecosystem.”
Linaro uses a unique business model where multiple companies jointly invest in a software engineering team that creates core open source software in a collaborative and transparent environment. The effectiveness of Linaro’s approach has been demonstrated by Linaro becoming the third-largest company contributor to the Linux 3.5 kernel*. Linaro’s contribution to improving ARM’s support in the open source Linux community has recently been recognized by Linus Torvalds**.
“Linux is driving innovation in every area of computing from mobile and embedded to the cloud. Linaro’s enterprise efforts will bring together software engineers to help accelerate Linux development for ARM servers, and we’re confident that this new server-focused group will advance Linux in these areas and offer additional choices to Linux users around the world.” said Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation.
ARM servers are expected to be initially adopted in hyperscale computing environments, especially in large web farms and clusters, where flexible scaling, energy efficiency and an optimal footprint are key design requirements. The Linaro Enterprise Group will initially work on low-level Linux boot architecture and kernel software for use by SoC vendors, commercial Linux providers and OEMs in delivering the next generation of low-power ARM-based 32- and 64-bit servers. Linaro expects initial software delivery before the end of 2012 with ongoing releases thereafter.
*Source: Who wrote 3.5? Greg Kroah-Hartman, LWN, 25 July 2012: https://lwn.net/Articles/507986/ (subscription required)
** Source: Torvalds touts Linux’s advances in power, ARM and cell phones Paula Rooney, ZDNet, 30 August 2012:http://www.zdnet.com/torvalds-touts-linuxs-advances-in-power-arm-and-cell-phones-7000003509
About Linaro
Linaro is the place where engineers from the world’s leading technology companies define the future of Linux on ARM. The company is a not-for-profit engineering organization with over 120 engineers working on consolidating and optimizing open source software for the ARM architecture, including developer tools, the Linux kernel, ARM power management, and other software infrastructure. Linaro is distribution neutral: it wants to provide the best software foundations to everyone, and to reduce non-differentiating and costly low level fragmentation.
To ensure commercial quality software, Linaro’s work includes comprehensive test and validation on member hardware platforms. The full scope of Linaro’s engineering work is open to all online. To find out more, please visit http://www.linaro.org.
Linaro Enterprise Group (LEG) Founding Member Testimonials
Cavium, Inc.
“Cavium’s Project Thunder is designed to deliver a family of highly integrated, multi-core processors that will incorporate full custom cores built from the ground up based on the 64-bit ARMv8 instruction set architecture (ISA) into an innovative system-on-chip (SoC) solution. Thunder SoCs are designed to redefine features, performance, power and cost metrics for the next generation cloud and datacenter markets,” said Raghib Hussain, CTO and Cofounder of Cavium. “We are committed to supporting Linaro’s LEG effort that will provide a unified and consistent software base for our customers and ecosystem partners. LEG’s software specifications and deliverables will accelerate ARM based server development.”
For complete list of member quotes go to the following link: http://www.cavium.com/newsevents_Cavium_Ecosystem_ARM-Servers_Linaro.html
