OpenAMP project joins the Linaro Community Projects division

Linaro Community Projects Division, the division of Linaro managing open source community projects with open governance, today announced that the Open Asymmetric Multi-Processing (OpenAMP) project is becoming a Linaro Community Project, joining the already hosted projects Trusted Firmware and devicetree.org. The OpenAMP project aims to standardize interactions between operating environments in a heterogenous embedded system through open source solutions. The founding members of this project include Arm, Kalray, Linaro, Mentor, ST Microelectronics, Wind River and Xilinx. For the most up-to-date list of members, go to www.openampproject.org.

SoCs (system on a chip) are becoming more heterogeneous, with multiple CPU (central processing unit) clusters and special purpose accelerators. As a result, AMP (asymmetric multiprocessor) systems need to be able to run different operating environments side-by-side on the same chip. Until now, however, there has been no standard shared memory scheme for the configuration and interaction between these environments. By creating standards and open source frameworks, the OpenAMP project will simplify the creation of these mixed systems. Becoming a Linaro Community Project will enable a more formal collaborative approach to driving much needed standardization. 

“Standardization and open source reference implementations are essential to drive the Arm ecosystem forward,’’ said Rob Booth, Linaro COO. “We are very pleased to see OpenAMP become a Linaro Community Project and look forward to working with its members on simplifying the creation of AMP systems.” 

“Demand for heterogenous SoCs incorporating different types of compute is growing, driven by the complex requirements of applications such as machine learning, autonomous systems, cloud and edge compute,” said Mark Hambleton, vice president of open source software, Arm. “OpenAMP delivers a common technology for communicating between these processing elements, eliminating the need to design custom drivers, reducing the engineering required and enabling multiple hardware platforms to be supported from a single set of APIs.”

“Xilinx sees heterogenous compute as the future,“ said Tomas Evensen, CTO Embedded Software at Xilinx. “We’re proud to collaborate with our peers in the OpenAMP organization to drive the project forward and make it easy for everyone to use and benefit from the technology.”

“Systems comprised of multiple runtime environments require robust high-speed message-passing infrastructure. OpenAMP addresses this application need for multichip and multicore platforms,” said Maarten Koning, Vice President, Wind River Technology Office. “As a founding member, Wind River is proud to participate, support, and contribute to the OpenAMP project to accelerate the development of such systems across a range of industries, including automotive, industrial, and medical.”

“We are excited to join the OpenAMP initiative” said Stéphane Cordova, Vice-President of Embedded Business Unit at Kalray. “It’s framework provides a perfect fit to support heterogeneous computing on our intelligent MPPA processor and its manycore architecture. In particular, the possibility to aggregate multiple applications or functions on multiple Operating Systems is really one of the MPPA strengths and will be greatly facilitated with OpenAMP. We are looking for a fruitful cooperation with OpenAMP members.”

“STMicroelectronics released a new STM32 Microprocessor Family based on heterogeneous cores supporting a mainlined open-source Linux distribution”, said Kamel Kholti, Microprocessor Marketing Manager. “Joining the OpenAMP community project has been an obvious choice for STMicroelectronics to standardize coprocessor management and to contribute to defining system architecture for heterogeneous SoCs.”

“As a co-creator and founding member, Mentor is excited to see the OpenAMP project become a Linaro Community Project”, said Scot Morrison, General Manager of Embedded Platform Solutions at Mentor Graphics. “Linaro Community Project will provide the much-needed logistics to formalize the collaboration and standardization of OpenAMP. OpenAMP is instrumental in addressing the needs of modern heterogeneous computing platforms with its efficient communication and CPU management components. Mentor will continue to be an active contributor and user of OpenAMP with the Mentor Embedded Multicore Framework, the first commercial implementation of OpenAMP, to address the needs of the market.”

The project is primarily focused on two efforts: standardizing the way AMP is used and providing a clean-room open source implementation. Based on the existing open source implementations of RemoteProc, rpmsg, Virtio and Device tree, it covers aspects such as lifecycle operations, messaging, low level abstractions and proxy operations. Resource configuration using System Device Trees is currently under development and future work includes faster messaging and standardizing the configuration of AMP systems through System DeviceTrees.

About OpenAMP
Open Asymmetric Multi-Processing (OpenAMP) is a framework providing the software components needed to enable the development of software applications for asymmetric multi-processing (AMP) systems. It allows operating systems to interact within a broad range of complex homogeneous and heterogeneous architectures and allows asymmetric multiprocessing applications to leverage parallelism offered by the multicore configuration. For more information about the project or to find out how to get involved, go to http://openampproject.org/. 

About Linaro Community Projects 
Linaro Community Projects Division is the division of Linaro managing open source community projects with open governance. Linaro is leading collaboration on open source development in the Arm ecosystem. The company has over 250 engineers working on consolidating and optimizing open source software for the Arm architecture, including developer tools, the Linux kernel, Arm power management, and other software infrastructure. Linaro is distribution neutral: it wants to provide the best software foundations to everyone by working upstream, and to reduce non-differentiating and costly low-level fragmentation. The effectiveness of the Linaro approach has been demonstrated by Linaro consistently being listed as one of the top ten company contributors, worldwide, to Linux kernels since 3.10. To ensure commercial quality software, Linaro’s work includes comprehensive test and validation on member hardware platforms. 

The full scope of Linaro engineering work is open to all online. To find out more, please visit http://www.linaro.org and http://www.96Boards.org.

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Ebba Simpson

Senior Marketing Manager

Linaro

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