Linaro Landing Teams
Linaro’s Core and Club Members have access to a dedicated engineering team, in other words a “landing team”. A landing team is a group of Linaro engineers dedicated to one Linaro member. The team executes a Statement of Work (SoW), usually under NDA and all work plans are agreed upon with the member. A landing team may be comprised of engineers from member companies who will collaboratively work on tasks defined in the SoW. The landing team predominantly supports the member in two areas: upstreaming and testing.
A landing team will work with the member to upstream it’s platforms to the Linux kernel so that they benefit from the current stable kernel version, in other words the latest software updates and security fixes. This may involve work such as adding HALs and framework support for Android, implementing and upstreaming recipes for Yocto project support or porting open source software, libraries and tools for member SOCs (system-on-chips). Working with a landing team helps member companies leverage Linaro’s experience in upstreaming and the Linux kernel to build strong and healthy open source ecosystems for their platforms.
Linaro has a strong track record in the field of testing, having created tools such as LAVA (Linaro Automation and Validation Architecture) and LKFT (Linaro’s Linux Kernel Functional Test Framework) . Landing teams provide support to member companies through kernel upstream testing and are able to provide software release testing for member companies’ products. This gives members the peace of mind that their platforms and products are running on software which is as secure and of as high quality as is possible.
Case in point: Linux releases for QualcommTM Snapdragon® processors
A good example of the type of work Linaro landing teams deliver to members are the Linux releases for QualcommTM Snapdragon® processors. Qualcomm is a core member and has had a landing team since 2014. One of the tasks the landing team has is to support and evolve the Snapdragon open source ecosystem. As a result, Linaro releases a set of Linux software builds for platforms based on Qualcomm Snapdragon processors. These releases are based on the Linux mainline kernel and rely solely upon open-source user space packages. To access these releases click here. Alternatively, check out this video on how to download the releases.
