Hardware Companies Team Up To Fight Mobile Linux Fragmentation

Nunavut writes with news that a number of hardware companies have banded together to battle the fragmentation of the mobile Linux market. ARM, Freescale Semiconductor, IBM, Samsung, ST-Ericsson, and Texas Instruments are forming Linaro, a nonprofit organization that plans to focus on "low-level software around the Linux kernel that touches the silicon, key pieces of middleware that enable new markets, and tools that help the developer write and debug code." "Linaro's chief goal is to reduce the time that it takes to bring a new ARM-powered product to market with Linux. This effort is largely neutral with respect to what software environment and components individual vendors choose to run in user space. Linaro will not compete with existing platforms such as MeeGo and Android. Instead, it will attempt to improve the shared underlying software components that allow those platforms and others to run on ARM SoCs. In principle, this could actually reduce fragmentation at the lower levels of the Linux stack."

Re:Biggest issue they face...

[Anonymous Coward]

What in god's name are you blathering about? This is a non profit organization that intends to deal with low level hardware libraries. It has nothing to do with "apps" and they have no intention of shipping a product. All of this is right in the summary.

Duct Tape Prevents Mobile Linux Fragmentation

[tomhudson]

Just tell him that they're recommending duct tape to prevent mobile linux fragmentation - he obviously only reads the headlines while trying to get a first post :-)

And it eliminates the need to defrag (I know, linux doesn't need defragging :-) - just add a new layer of tape every month.

And if you want, Monica Lewinsky is now offering a line of Duct Tape Nobile Phone Defragmentation Skins - because you never know where someone's going to stick their phone ...

Re:

[Sleepy]

The SUMMARY? LOL

Back in the day... we used to ridicule people who actually read the STORY but didn't also cross reference it from another media source!

Give the guy a break -- look at his USER ID. You can't possibly expect a Generation Z'er to read the SUMMARY, can you? Trust me, it's a lost cause.
Just accept it will only get worse.. I expect the next generation only posts words without capitalizing the first word of each sentence, all words without vowels and zero punctuation.

Now get off my lawn!

re biggest issue they face

[Anonymous Coward]

generation z is the last one dude the world ends after this so quit wasting time reading summaries and punctuating how much did you pay for 4551 anyway question mark

Re:Biggest issue they face...

[Anonymous Coward]

Congrats!

You've won the coveted "You Retard!" slashdot community award.

Do you have any thing to say about this prestigious win?

Re:Uh oh

[maxwell demon]

enable new markets

This probably will not go well.

Oh, that one is easy. Just go to the configuration, and check the box at "enable new markets". Alternatively you can also do it by hand with
echo 1 > /proc/market/new/enabled

Motorola Backflip on AT&T

[tepples]

Just go to the configuration, and check the box at "enable new markets".

Unless your carrier has removed "enable new markets" from the menu, as AT&T appears to do [pcworld.com].

if they'll fail

[underqualified]

they'll be yet another fragment

Re:

[sznupi]

...and since quite a few (not only Android and MeeGo, also part of bada OS for example) of those "high-level APIs that matter" rely on essentially commoditized underlying OS - what's wrong with providers of architecture and SoCs which run that OS teaming up?

Re:

[jedidiah]

Yes. This is about "standardizing the Darwin part" of an iPhone or an iPad.

If this leads to Android or Ubuntu being able to readily run on an iPad and other similar SoCs then I believe they will have set out what they wanted to achieve.

Re:

[jedidiah]

Mobile ARM systems aren't beefy enough to be terribly effective if all of the acceleration features aren't available.

Even an iphone suffers from this if you force it outside of it's predefined limits.

Re:

[sznupi]

Why would they even care about what iPad has, considering Apple surely tries to prevent tempering also with this product?

Re:if they'll fail

[JohnBailey]

These days, the underlying OS doesn't matter, even when it comes to mobile devices. That's not where the interesting or critical development is happening. What matters these days is the higher-level APIs. Those are what mobile applications use, with very few mobile apps actually needing to care about the underlying OS.

Absolutely.. The really important bit is the place where they hay is stored for the unicorns. Apple user right?

Re:

[sznupi]

In other words...
http://www.debian.org/ports/arm/ [debian.org]
http://www.emdebian.org/ [emdebian.org]
?

Good idea - but these orgs move very slowly

[Foredecker]

I've participated in a few industry wide organizations like this. They can be somewhat effective, but even then, they move very, very slowly.

Re:

[Alef]

After having read the FAQ [linaro.org] on the Linaro web site and a blog entry [markshuttleworth.com] by Mark Shuttleworth, I get the feeling that this is an initiative coming from Canonical. If they will be driving this forward, with support from the hardware vendors of course, it might not become your garden variety standards organisation. In that case, the key issue will be to keep the commitment from the hardware manufacturers. But I guess it could work out alright considering Canonical isn't a direct competitor to any of them.

Re:

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I would suspect that the only people unhappy with this particular initiative are those who compete with linux, for obvious reasons, and possibly those companies who currently specialize in doing bespoke embedded linux work for hire. MontaVista, for instance, has basically made a business of doing the (often obnoxious and tricky) work of turning "linux runs on ARCHITECTURE" into "Linux is now running on CUSTOMERS_HORRID_EMBEDDED_BOARD". An industry consortium dedicated to giving that away probably isn't idea

You are correct.

[agoliveira]

Canonical started this a few months ago.
I work for Canonical (not in this project tough) and follow it with a personal interest.

Not necessarily

[Kupfernigk]

To quote a BSi project manager I once used to work with, there are 2 sorts of standards initiative - those intended to get something done, which can be very fast, and those intended to hold up standardisation while the prime mover gains market share. Since this is intended to create a standard quicker than Windows 7 whatever edition can gain traction, it could all happen very fast.

I once had the good fortune to work on a project where the standard proceeded so much faster than capability that for 6 months we were the world's only supplier of a standards-compliant product, though a small one. Believe me, it was worth the effort.

Re:

[yorugua]

I've participated in a few industry wide organizations like this. They can be somewhat effective, but even then, they move very, very slowly.

I hope it turns out better than the old "Project Monterrey" thing...

Re:Direct response to Meego

[dwater]

won't this also help meego?

Re:

[MacAnkka]

My thoughts exactly. These Linaro guys will focus on getting the the low level kernel stuff patched up and fixed for the all the new ARM platforms as they are released. MeeGo develelopers can use that, they won't have to worry about the low level stuff as much and they can focus on the user experience and all the other special stuff that makes MeeGo different. Same goes for all the other linux-based mobile operating systems. I guess that would include Android, too.

That the way I understood it, at least.

Re:

[dwater]

I'm sure they say as much on their web site...this is from their FAQ :

Q8. How is Linaro different from Android, MeeGo, LiMo or other similar distribution?

A8. Linaro software and tools provide a common software foundation for the industry to use with multiple software stacks and distributions. Linaro software and tools focus on areas that interact directly with the silicon. Distributions such as Android and Ubuntu provide the full user experience whereas Linaro enhances the upstream projects directly and pro

It's the apps, stupid

[Burz]

What is this about improving the ability to bring new Linux-based devices to market? There are scads of them already, and that's part of the problem.

The fragmentation these devices represent mainly occurs above and below the kernel level: Above in the sense that the libraries and UI kits that are included change greatly not only between devices, but also between iterations of a single product; Below in that there is no (realistically desirable) minimum hardware spec for a Linux-based device in any given cl

Re:It's the apps, stupid

[aero6dof]

Given the membership and their statements, it actually sounds like they might be working on integrating/standardizing the access to underlying hardware. Most of those manufacturers make ARM chips with various added peripherals. It would certainly save time if I could grab a Linux distro that was everything below the UI level without having to spend time integrating the low level chip libraries to access the custom hardware functions in the chip.

Re:

[Daengbo]

I get where you're coming from: choice is bad, especially when it involves MP3 players, TVs, and phones. I get it, but I don't agree. This is about making hardware vendors' lives easier, not application developers'.

Summary

[bcmm]

Very good idea. Code reuse is always good. However, one minor point about the summary: fat chance of Android either helping or being helped by this - AFAIK, they've already messed up their Linux-derived kernel to the point where you can't assume that modules from actual Linux will work with it.

That's why I'm rooting for MeeGo

[Qubit]

I gotta hand it to the MeeGo folks. Their project has goals like

1) Keep it FOSS. All of it (in the core distro)
2) Upstream code whenever possible

Even if you don't use it as a mobile OS, the work being done on it by Intel, Nokia, etc... is going to benefit pretty much every Linux-derived distro out there.

If Linaro wants to join the party and throw time/money at improving Linux-y software running on ARM chips, that sounds pretty darn good to me!

Words

[Alarindris]

Why "Fight Fragmentation" rather than "Promote Unity"? We're all on the same team right?

Re:

[sznupi]

We love to fight, it would seem.

Re:

[stiggle]

Fight is "action"
Promote is "passive"

Both are "marketing"

Therefore if you want to convey the synergy of the stakeholders within the working group committee then you need to be forthcoming in the policy statement to delineate the competing elements and actively market your intentions.

PS. I've been writing crap for management too often the last few weeks - I'm sorry :-)

I predict

[abulafia]

That this will work about as well as the various "let's unite Unix" corporate drum circles from the 80s and 90s.

They did eventually get things to a point where a subset that wasn't entirely useless could usually compile pretty cleanly, most of the time, sort of, in most places. So long as the code wasn't concerned with whatever the market was concerned with five years prior.

Linus did more to unite Unix than any of the cross-company bodies.

To be more fair, moving the compatibility bar forward, even slowly,

And

[mahadiga]

What's wrong with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier_Grade_Linux [wikipedia.org]