Ubuntu To Work On Rapid Hardware Enablement

Ubuntu developers will be discussing this week about how they can rapidly bring-up support for new hardware within the Linux distribution.

One of the many discussions to be had next week at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Copenhagen aside from ridding old GNOME code, pushing Ubuntu as a gaming platform, looking at Ubuntu TV, XZ packages by default, porting Ubuntu to the Nexus 7, and listening to Valve talk about Linux will be a session about rapidly bring-up Ubuntu on new hardware.

For the Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail developer summit next week in Denmark, another session to catch my interest is about Canonical wanting to rapidly bring-up support for new hardware in Ubuntu. "Rapid archive bringup for new hardware."

The session is described as:

Discussion on how we can do a quick (and possibly dirty) archive build for new hardware.

The port may require new patches to the toolchain and/or kernel. Cross compiling is essential, as the new hardware may not be available.

Most other packages will remain as-is, but may need a recompile with the new toolchain. We should be fine with a very minimal initial package set. Perhaps minbase?

Support for "rapid bringup" archives will be variable. The general use-case will be for proof-of-concept code while full support for an official archive is in progress.

It will be interesting to see what comes of this, since for bringing up ARM hardware they have mostly relied upon Linaro. In the x86 space, Canonical isn't known for doing too much low-level upstream work. We will see next week more on this topic and others for Ubuntu 13.04.