Who is Linaro?
Linaro is an engineering organization that collaborates with the Arm ecosystem to develop open-source software, tooling, and platforms for Arm-based systems used in enterprise, edge, and embedded environments.
- Collaborative engineering of open-source software for Arm-based platforms, including kernel, toolchains, and system software.
- Development and optimization of Arm-focused reference platforms and builds for infrastructure, edge, and embedded use cases.
- Engineering services and working groups for semiconductor vendors, OEMs, and ecosystem partners targeting Arm architectures.
- Enablement of Arm architectures across Linux distributions, cloud and edge workloads, and CI/validation frameworks.
- Technical communities, forums, and events focused on Arm software enablement and ecosystem alignment.
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More About Linaro
Linaro focuses on collaborative open-source engineering for Arm architectures in environments where Arm-based processors are deployed in servers, networking equipment, storage, edge computing, and embedded systems. Enterprise stakeholders, semiconductor vendors, and OEMs use Linaro’s work to align on common software baselines, reduce fragmentation across Arm platforms, and improve interoperability between hardware and software stacks.
The organization’s activities center on Arm architectures (processor architecture), Linux (operating system), open-source toolchains such as GCC and LLVM/Clang (developer tooling), and related low-level software components such as firmware, boot loaders, and board support packages (system software). Linaro collaborates with Arm ecosystem members to improve performance, stability, and maintainability of these components on Arm-based systems in both data center and edge deployments.
Linaro maintains and contributes to reference platforms and builds for Arm-based hardware that enterprises and vendors can adopt as a baseline for their own products and solutions. These reference platforms can fall under categories such as infrastructure software, Operating System (OS) enablement, and cloud and edge platform enablement. They are used to validate hardware and software combinations, provide reproducible build and test pipelines, and support Continuous Integration (CI) practices across the ecosystem.
In addition to code contributions, Linaro organizes working groups and collaborative projects where member companies coordinate requirements and development for specific domains, such as servers, networking, edge computing, and IoT/embedded platforms. These activities help align kernel configurations, firmware standards, driver support, and user space enablement for Arm-based systems used in heterogeneous enterprise environments.
From a marketplace categorization perspective, Linaro’s work aligns with infrastructure software enablement for Arm architectures, Linux and open-source platform engineering (infrastructure and DevOps tooling), and embedded and edge platform enablement (edge computing and Internet of Things (IoT)). Its offerings are positioned as shared engineering resources, reference implementations, and ecosystem coordination rather than end-user commercial products. Enterprise technical stakeholders engage with Linaro outputs through upstream open-source projects, reference builds, documentation, test frameworks, and collaborative engineering programs that support deployment of Arm-based systems at scale.
Our description of Linaro. Updated December 2025.
