3. www.linaro.orgSlide 3
Linaro – Past, Present and Future
Why Linaro?
The ARM partnership needs a place to do collaborative engineering
Common engineering problems need solving efficiently
ARM partnership needs to get better at ‘open source’
The game is evolving, getting broader
Now have 24 members of Linaro
Industry groups LEG and LNG, and being asked to form more
Wide member expertise and experience
4. www.linaro.orgSlide 4
Linaro – Past, Present and Future
Problems, always problems...
Consolidation / preventing fragmentation
New technologies
Kernel frameworks supporting diversity
Standards driving disaggregation
Segment specific technologies, code bases
Testing and validation
5. www.linaro.orgSlide 5
Oh, and a Common Threat
Linaro was also formed as a response to a common threat
You all know who I mean, Intel
They haven’t stood still for 3 years
Driving markets vertically via distributions (versus ARM’s horizontal,
‘enable everyone’ play)
Was MeeGo, now Tizen (also Android)
Very active in power management (‘race to idle’) and all market
segments
6. www.linaro.orgSlide 6
Oh, and a Common Threat
The competition is not really between technologies, it’s
between business models
Can many collaborating companies win against the monolith?
What does this mean for software?
Drives efficient collaboration
A lot of software frameworks do not support ARM’s diversity
Outside of mobile, software not always well tuned for ARMv7-A
8. www.linaro.orgSlide 8
Climbing out of the Gravity Well
Much progress
Used to play in /arch/arm/{mach-foo, platform-bar}
Moved up into /arch/arm
Now discussing how to implement / partition the scheduler changes
needed to support sophisticated power management subsystems, such
as ARM’s big.LITTLE technology
Still...
Many ARM system patches still not upstream / upstreamable
Need more maintainers that have access to ARM hardware and are
knowledgeable about the ARM architecture
ARM Community still small (although ARM system engineering is
probably larger than Intel’s)
9. www.linaro.orgSlide 9
Trends: Disaggregation
dis·ag·gre·gate
v. dis·ag·gre·gat·ed, dis·ag·gre·gat·ing, dis·ag·gre·gates
To divide into constituent parts, to break up or break apart.
Unbundle
break apart proprietary components, sandwiching with open source
components
Supported by open standards
Driven by end customers
OpenStack is a good example...
10. www.linaro.orgSlide 10
OpenStack
OpenStack is a cloud operating system that controls large
pools of compute, storage, and networking resources
throughout a datacenter.
http://www.openstack.org
11. www.linaro.orgSlide 11
Why is OpenStack Important to Linaro?
Drives engineering activities in Linaro:
Java
PHP
Python
Virtualization
Gives us a framework for testing
Stresses the components that we’re engineering
Gives us a framework for benchmarking
Looking for areas to improve performance of the overall system
12. www.linaro.orgSlide 12
Standards
Standards driving ARM systems
Change from mobile, where standards are few (although you could think
of Android as a standard)
Established markets demand standards (need to avoid a ‘me too’
approach)
Closed standards
Extend the status quo (and who wants that?)
Driven by the technology producers
Open standards support disaggregation
Tend to be driven by the end customers
Encourage many vendors and competition
13. www.linaro.orgSlide 13
HSA (Heterogeneous System Architecture)
http://hsafoundation.com
GP GPU
using the right compute engines to execute software
shared, coherent caching model
14. www.linaro.orgSlide 14
Which Standards?
Open source software can quickly adopt standards
Google any standard and someone’s implemented it for Linux
Open source often used to prove standards
Which standard should we choose?
Generally, driven by members, especially the groups
Example #1: Networking – Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK)
Should we adopt this for ARM based networking?
Better ‘kit of parts’, such as openEM (open event machine)?
Example #2: STB – Comcast RDK
Invent our own standards?
If needed, but generally see Linaro as the implementers of standards
15. www.linaro.orgSlide 15
Community
Who is the ARM open source community?
Systems engineers versus end users
(Probably) more ARM engineers working on ARM platforms than Intel
has working on Intel platforms
Availability of ARM platforms opens up
Distribution support
Community projects
University research
Maker community
Love ARM platforms
Busily inventing new things
Raspberry pi cat feeder
18. www.linaro.orgSlide 18
Standards versus Groups
Graphics and Multimedia
UMM, OpenGLES, CDF, HSA
LEG
OpenCompute, LAMP, OpenStack, Hadoop, HipHop VM
LNG
DPDK
openEM
STB
Comcast RDK / Android / ??
Automotive
Genivi
19. www.linaro.orgSlide 19
Strategy
Start working with the LLVM community (support ARM buildbots etc)
Grow effort based on member’s input / groups
LLVM versus GCC
LLVM will grow in importance
LLVM is being used to build Android
Linaro is benchmarking LLVM and has made some fixes
LLVM important for GP GPU:
OpenCL
HSA (Heterogeneous System Architecture)
LLVM Strategy
20. www.linaro.orgSlide 20
The Competition
Intel are still the competition
Their strategy is vertical, ARM’s is horizontal (and Linaro fits into
that horizontal play)
Drive an x86 distribution into markets via top player
Was Nokia, now Samsung
Was Meego, now Tizan
Subsidize the engineering effort
Hardware is approaching ARM’s for power efficiency, but the
competition is not really between technologies, it’s between
business models
Hardware and software
Success and Failure
Intel has not had a great deal of software success (MeeGo(ne))
ARM
A lot of great stuff has happened (reference the consolidation of the kernel)
Outside of Linaro, companies still upstreaming a lot of duplication
Need to avoid complacency
Server is their turf, so expect trouble
Gloves off in networking, clear choices
22. www.linaro.orgSlide 22
Security
Standards
Secure OS
GlobalPlatforms – system architecture / client API
Trusted Computing Group (TCG)
ARM standards (initially Server, but roll out to all ARMv8)
SMC calling convention
Power State Coordination Interface(PSCI)
Trusted Board boot requirements
Trusted Boot Server Architecture
Kernel
Will track hardening / security via the kernel group and LKS
Need access to all components to test the boot architecture
Currently, missing the Trusted Execution Environment (TEE)
Get Trustonic involved (support in LAVA etc)
Open source TEE contemplated
23. More about Linaro: http://www.linaro.org/about/
More about Linaro engineering: http://www.linaro.org/engineering/
How to join: http://www.linaro.org/about/how-to-join
Linaro members: www.linaro.org/members
24. www.linaro.orgSlide 24
Humility
Who are we?
Let’s not get carried away by an open source agenda
Remember that members pay for our efforts
We are the ‘tip of the iceberg’, the 1% of a company’s efforts.
Members succeed, so do we.
Concentrate on the common problems
It’s (still) all about collaboration
Avoid ‘crank the handle’ patch shuffling
Remember that members pay us a lot of money to be part of
this
For example, companies spending money on Linaro as they restructure