ARM, Freescale Semiconductor, IBM, Samsung, ST-Ericsson and Texas Instruments have formed Linaro, a not-for-profit open source software engineering company, to boost the use of Linux software on mobile phones, tablets and other devices.

The companies said that Linaro’s outputs will accelerate new consumer products that use Linux-based distributions such as Android, LiMo, MeeGo, Ubuntu and webOS, in conjunction with semiconductor SoCs to provide new features at the lowest possible power consumption.

Linaro will provide an optimised base for distributions and developers by creating new releases of optimised tools, kernel and middleware software validated for a range of SoCs, every six months, the companies said.

Linaro’s resources and open source offerings will allow device manufacturers to speed up development time, improve performance and reduce engineering time spent on non-differentiating, low-level software. Linux distributions, open source and proprietary software projects will benefit from Linaro’s investment, with more stable code becoming widely available as a common base for innovation, the companies claim.

Tom Lantzsch, executive officer of Linaro, said: “The dramatic growth of open source software development can now be seen in internet-based, always-connected mobile and consumer products.

“Linaro will help accelerate this trend further by increasing investment on key open source projects and providing industry alignment with the community to deliver the best Linux-based products for the benefit of the consumer.”

Linaro’s first software release is planned for November 2010 and will provide performance optimisations for SoCs based on the ARM Cortex -A processor family.

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