The development of Linux on mobile devices may be poised to get a boost thanks to the formation of a new industry group called Linaro, backed by a consortium of chip vendors including ARM, Freescale, Texas Instruments, Samsung and ST-Ericsson.

Processor manufacturer ARM, Freescale, IBM, Samsung, ST-Ericsson and Texas Instruments have teamed up to form a new software engineering company dedicated to enhancing open source for the next generation of always-connected, always-on computing

The open industry group overseeing the PowerPC architecture has gained seven new members, including two more embedded Linux providers. Power.org now boasts 35 corporate members, including semiconductor vendors, embedded design service companies, chip design tool vendors, chip foundries, OEMs (original equipment manufacturers), and hardware and software vendors.

"The Linux Foundation welcomes the increase in upstream investment that Linaro has made on behalf of the ARM community," Zemlin said in a statement.

Eighteen mobile handsets that support the LiMo (Linux Mobile) Foundation platform have been announced by Aplix, LG Electronics, Motorola, NEC, Panasonic Mobile Communications, Purple Labs, and Samsung. The LiMO Foundation also announced the addition of nine new members, including Access, Orange, and AMD.

The Eclipse Foundation has announced the creation of a new SOA Industry Working Group, whose founding members include the Engineering Group from Italy, Germany company itemis, French firm Obeo and Sopera

Mark Shuttleworth posts his thoughts about Linaro. Canonical will be working closely with the project, which has plans for six-month release cycles like Ubuntu. Linaro will also be using some Ubuntu infrastructure such as LaunchPad

Samsung Electronics announced its much-anticipated Android consumer tablet, due to ship in Europe in mid-September. The Samsung Galaxy Tab runs Android 2.2 on a 1GHz Cortex-A8 processor, and offers a seven-inch, 1024 x 600 capacitive touchscreen, a three-megapixel camera...

The ARM processor family is a complicated one, with many different variations, leading to large numbers of separate sub-architectures in the Linux kernel. A quick glance at the ARM directory in a recent kernel tree shows nearly 70 different sub-architectures, each corresponding to a different CPU or system-on-chip (SoC).