Linaro is an engineering organization that works on free and open-source software such as the Linux kernel, the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), QEMU, power management, graphics and multimedia interfaces for the ARM family of instruction sets and implementations thereof as well as for the Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA).
The founding of Linaro was announced at Computex in June 2010 by ARM, Freescale Semiconductor, IBM, Samsung, ST-Ericsson, and Texas Instruments in a joint press conference.
In addition, the company has created groups tasked with addressing fragmentation in the following market segments: Consumer Devices, Datacenter & Cloud, Edge & Fog Computing and Windows on Arm.
This group went on to start the OpenDataPlane initiative which “defined a set of APIs to be used across the full range of processor architectures and networking offloads available”.
[7] In February 2014, Linaro formed the Linaro Security Working group to “create open source Android and Linux reference designs for Trusted execution environment (TEE) technology.”[8] Shortly after its formation, the Security Working Group took over project governance of (Open Portable Trusted Execution Environment), initially a proprietary TEE project developed by ST-Ericsson.
In 2015, Linaro launched 96Boards, a specification created with the aim of delivering compatible low cost, small footprint 32-bit and 64-bit Cortex-A boards.
[14] In 2023, Linaro acquired Arm Forge[15] - a suite of debug and performance analysis tools which can be used across multiple compute architectures for server and HPC applications.
It makes regular public releases along with a number of reference builds of kernels and userspace for various Linux distributions (including Android and Ubuntu) on member SoCs.
[18] The team's mission is to bring competing companies together to work on common solutions to problems and enable OEM's, commercial Linux providers and System on Chip (SOC) vendors to collaborate in a neutral environment on the development of the core software needed by the rapidly emerging market for low-power hyperscale servers.