The Linux Foundation Announces Consumer Electronics Long Term Stable Kernel Initiative

New kernel tree addresses electronics makers’ need for regular updates and long-term support

PRAGUE {LinuxCon Europe} October 26, 2011 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced it is hosting a new project created by its Consumer Electronics (CE) workgroup.

The new project, the Long Term Support Initiative (LTSI), provides for both an annual release of a Linux kernel suitable for supporting the lifespan of consumer electronics products and regular updates of those releases for two years.

LTSI is an industry-wide project created and supported by Hitachi, LG Electronics, NEC, Panasonic, Qualcomm Atheros, Renesas Electronics Corporation, Samsung Electronics, Sony and Toshiba and hosted at The Linux Foundation to maintain a common Linux base for use in a variety of consumer electronics products. The project creates and maintains a long-term industry tree, which is expected to be stable in quality for the typical lifetime of a consumer electronics product, typically 2-3 years.

Please visit The Linux Foundation Announcements page to see comments from the supporting companies.

This new initiative is crucial because device makers are doing significant back-porting, bug testing and driver development on their own, which carries substantial cost in terms of time-to-market, as well as development and engineering effort to maintain those custom kernels. Through collaboration in this initiative, these CE vendors will reduce the duplication of effort currently prevalent in the consumer electronics industry.

“The CE industry has leveraged Linux to reduce costs and speed time to market. Now they are taking the next step to reduce the costly duplication of effort at work maintaining custom kernels,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director at The Linux Foundation. “LTSI is an important effort because it will allow vendors to share the work of maintaining a common kernel for the consumer electronics industry, resulting in more use of Linux in the industry and increasing contributions from CE makers to the advancement of Linux.”

The LTSI tree is expected to be the usable base for the majority of embedded systems, as well as the base for ecosystem players (e.g., semiconductor vendors, set-vendors, software component vendors, distributors, and system/application framework providers). The LTSI project will combine the innovative features in newer kernels needed by CE vendors with a stable kernel, while helping those vendors get their code upstream to benefit the entire Linux community. The goal is to reduce the number of private trees currently in use in the CE industry and encourage more collaboration and sharing of development resources.

“The vendors in the CE Workgroup are excited to work with the Linux kernel community on this project,” said NEC executive and Linux Foundation board member Tsugikazu Shibata. “We need kernels that are both regularly updated and well maintained, and LTSI will provide that.”

“I am very happy to be working with the LTSI group to help them get their device-specific code into the mainline kernel.org tree through this initiative,” said Greg Kroah-Hartman, fellow at SUSE and member of the Technical Advisory board of The Linux Foundation.

For more information about LTSI, please visit: http://www.linuxfoundation.org/collaborate/workgroups/celf.

About The Linux Foundation

The Linux Foundation is a nonprofit consortium dedicated to fostering the growth of Linux. Founded in 2000, the organization sponsors the work of Linux creator Linus Torvalds and promotes, protects and advances the Linux operating system by marshaling the resources of its members and the open source development community. The Linux Foundation provides a neutral forum for collaboration and education by hosting Linux conferences, including LinuxCon, and generating original Linux research and content that advances the understanding of the Linux platform. Its web properties, including Linux.com, reach approximately two million people per month and include important Linux video resources. The organization also provides extensive Linux training opportunities that feature the Linux kernel community’s leading experts as instructors. Follow The Linux Foundation on Twitter.

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