Linaro announces support for 96Boards HiKey in AOSP

Cambridge, UK -- March 7, 2016 -- Linaro Ltd, the collaborative engineering organization developing open source software for the ARM® architecture, today announced that the 96Boards HiKey octa-core 64-bit ARMv8 community board is supported in AOSP (Android Open Source Project). Developers can now download source code from AOSP and create a working build without the need to pull patches from any other repository.

Linaro has worked on AOSP contributions and toolchain optimizations since its establishment in 2010. Over the last five years, Linaro has provided various builds of AOSP for member hardware, but these have all been maintained outside of the AOSP common tree. Moving forward for existing and future versions of Android, Linaro is simplifying its provision of builds and focusing its efforts on getting full support and ongoing maintenance for member hardware into AOSP. Support for the 96Boards HiKey is available now and we expect additional hardware platform support will follow.

“One of the challenges of developing on AOSP has been the lack of a developer friendly platform combining community hardware with an open source software stack,” said Tom Gall, Director of the Linaro Mobile Group (LMG). “We’re very happy to have been able to have support for the 96Boards HiKey accepted into the AOSP common tree and look forward to enabling developers.”

Information about the HiKey board and Running Android on HiKey are available here: http://source.android.com/source/devices.html. Linaro is providing instructions for developers here: http://linaro.co/hikey-start and the hardware platform can be purchased from Lenovator (http://linaro.co/hikey-lenovator-buy) and seeed (http://linaro.co/hikey-seeed-buy). A video of Linaro CEO George Grey’s keynote at Linaro Connect, including this announcement, can be found here: http://linaro.co/bkk16-keynote

About Linaro
Linaro is leading collaboration on open source development in the ARM ecosystem. The company has over 250 engineers working on consolidating and optimizing open source software for the ARM architecture, including developer tools, the Linux kernel, ARM power management, and other software infrastructure. Linaro is distribution neutral: it wants to provide the best software foundations to everyone by working upstream, and to reduce non-differentiating and costly low level fragmentation. The effectiveness of the Linaro approach has been demonstrated by Linaro’s growing membership, and by Linaro consistently being listed as one of the top five company contributors, worldwide, to Linux kernels since 3.10.

To ensure commercial quality software, Linaro’s work includes comprehensive test and validation on member hardware platforms. The full scope of Linaro engineering work is open to all online. To find out more, please visit http://www.linaro.org and http://www.96Boards.org.