Intel Open-Sources Sound Firmware, Pushing For More Open Firmware

Imad Sousou, Intel's GM of the Open-Source Technology Center, had some interesting remarks to make during his keynote today as part of this week's Embedded Linux Conference in Portland.

First up, they have two new open-source project announcements: ACRN and Sound Open Firmware (SOF).

Sound Open Firmware has us most excited with Intel's focus now on opening up more of their firmware, beginning with audio. Sound Open Firmware includes an open-source audio DSP firmware and SDK. The SOF stack works on all Intel hardware platforms and can assist in debugging audio/DSP issues.

Sound Open Firmware is under the BSD/MIT for the firmware and BSD/GPL on the drivers and is designed to support third-party audio firmware, exhibits a modular design, and provides tooling around the audio DSP firmware. More details on the project at SOFProject.org.

Imad Sousou talked more during his keynote on open firmware and how it would be great having more open-source firmware. It will be interesting to see though if moving forward they take a more helpful tone around Coreboot (and any opening of the FSP?) and LinuxBoot... But today was just talking about open-source audio firmware at the Linux Foundation event.

The other announcement today is on a new reference hypervisor framework intended for embedded development. ACRN is a small footprint hypervisor with real-time capabilities and safety-critical computing as design goals for this Linux-based hypervisor with support for multiple guest operating systems. ACRN is advertised as "A Big Little Hypervisor for IoT Development."

More details on ACRN at ProjectACRN.org.