Linaro was at Computex in 2010 by ARM, IBM, Freescale, Samsung, ST-Ericsson and TI with the mission of reducing fragmentation, increasing optimization and making it easier for OEMs and ODMs to develop Linux-based products.

"Lots of different companies are pushing out products very quickly into the market, but they're not always doing a good job of pushing software upstream into the mainline kernel," Doel told me.

Over the past year, the group has built a team of more than 100 developers who have refined Linux on member chips and delivered code upstream for the benefit all . It's also created the evaluation builds for Android and Ubuntu, making it easier for device manufacturers to use Linaro's engineering.

The group's Linaro Automated Validation Architecture (LAVA) platform, meanwhile, runs on a test farm of members' low-cost boards and aims to help device makers get their products to market more quickly.

'Quick and Easy'