Some impressions from Linaro Connect

Linaro is an industry consortium dedicated to improving the functionality and performance of Linux on the ARM processor; its list of members includes many of the companies working in this area. Quite a bit of engineering work is done under the Linaro banner, to the point that it was the source of 4.6% of the changes going into the 3.8 kernel. A lot of Linaro's developers are employed by member companies and assigned to Linaro, but the number of developers employed by Linaro directly has been growing steadily. All told, there are hundreds of people whose work is related to Linaro in some way.

Given that those people work for a lot of different companies and are spread across the world, it makes sense that they would all want to get together on occasion. That is the purpose of the Linaro Connect events. These conferences are open to any interested attendee, but they are focused on Linaro employees and assignees who otherwise would almost never see each other. The result is that, in some ways, Linaro Connect resembles an internal corporate get-together more than a traditional Linux conference.

So, for example, the opening session was delivered by George Grey, Linaro's CEO; he used it to update attendees on recent developments in the Linaro organization. The Linaro Enterprise Group (LEG) was announced last November; at this point there are 25 engineers working with LEG and 14 member companies. More recently, the Linaro Networking Group was announced as an initiative to support the use of ARM processors in networking equipment. This group has 12 member companies, two of which have yet to decloak and identify themselves.

Life is good in the ARM world, George said; some 8.7 billion ARM chips were shipped in 2012. There are many opportunities for expansion, not the least of which is the data center. He pointed out that, in the US, data centers are responsible for 2.2% of all energy use; ARM provides the opportunity to reduce power costs considerably. The "Internet of things" is also a natural opportunity for ARM, though it brings its own challenges, not the least of which is security: George noted that he really does not want his heart rate to be broadcast to the world as a whole. And, he said, the upcoming 64-bit ARMv8 architecture is "going to change everything."

The event resembled a company meeting in other ways; for example, one of the talks on the first day was an orientation for new employees and assignees. Others were mentoring sessions aimed at helping developers learn how to get code merged upstream. One of the sessions on the final day was for the handing out of awards to the people who have done the most to push Linaro's objectives forward. And a large part of the schedule (every afternoon, essentially) was dedicated to hacking sessions aimed at the solution of specific problems. It was, in summary, a focused, task-oriented gathering meant to help Linaro meet its goals.

There were also traditional talk sessions, though the hope was for them to be highly interactive and task-focused as well. Your editor was amused to hear the standard complaint of conference organizers everywhere: despite their attempts to set up and facilitate discussions, more and more of the sessions seem to be turning into lecture-style presentations with one person talking at the audience. That said, your editor's overall impression was of an event with about 350 focused developers doing their best to get a lot of useful work done.

If there is a complaint to be made about Linaro Connect, it would be that the event, like much in the mobile and embedded communities, is its own world with limited connections to the broader community. Its sessions offered help on how to work with upstream; your editor, in his talk, suggested that Linaro's developers might want to work harder to be the upstream. ARM architecture maintainer Russell King was recently heard to complain about Linaro Connect, saying that it works outside the community and that "It can be viewed as corporate takeover of open source". It is doubtful that many see Linaro in that light; indeed, even Russell might not really view things in such a harsh way. But Linaro Connect does feel just a little bit isolated from the development community as a whole.

In any case, that is a relatively minor quibble. It is clear that the ARM community would like to be less isolated, and Linaro, through its strong focus on getting code upstream, is helping to make that happen. Contributions from the mobile and embedded communities have been steadily increasing for the last few years, to the point that they now make up a significant fraction of the changes going into the kernel. That can be expected to increase further as ARM developers become more confident in their ability to work with the core kernel, and as ARM processors move into new roles. Chances are, in a few years, we'll have a large set of recently established kernel developers, and that quite a few of them will have gotten their start at events like Linaro Connect.

[Your editor would like to thank Linaro for travel assistance to attend this event.]