Wikipedia
Linaro is an engineering organization that works on free and open-source software such as the Linux kernel, the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), power management, graphics and multimedia interfaces for the ARM family of instruction sets and implementations thereof as well as for the Heterogeneous System Architecture. The founding of Linaro was announced at Computex in June 2010 by ARM, Freescale Semiconductor, IBM, Samsung, ST-Ericsson, and Texas Instruments in a joint press conference. It also provides engineering and investment in upstream open source projects, a monthly release of tools and software and support to silicon companies in upstreaming code to be used with their system-on-a-chips (SoC). At some point Linaro joined the HSA Foundation.
Linaro focuses on the use of the ARM instruction set in its versions 7a (32-bit) and 8 (64-bit) including concrete implementations of these, such as SoCs that contain Cortex-A5, Cortex-A7, Cortex-A8, Cortex-A9, Cortex-A15, Cortex-A53 or Cortex-A57 processor(s). Linaro engineering works with upstream projects on a set of requirements that are determined by the Technical Steering Committee (TSC).
At the end of each month there is a release of tools and software that acts as a staging tree for code that will be pushed upstream. Linaro works on software that is close to the silicon such as kernel, multimedia, power management, graphics and security. Linaro aims to provide stable, tested tools and code for multiple software distributions to use to reduce low-level fragmentation of embedded Linux software.