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Founded in 2010, Linaro’s initial focus was to unify a fragmented Arm ecosystem – and that vision became a global reality. As the industry has evolved, so has Linaro: the company is now a services provider, leveraging its Arm expertise to help customers build high-performing, compliant, and sustainable products.

Microelectronics UK spoke to Davide Ricci, vice president of Linaro Solutions and Services, to find out more about the opportunities which lay ahead, both for Linaro and the wider ecosystem.

Many thanks to Davide for providing these responses.

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Tell us about your role and what Linaro does. What problems are you solving, and for whom?

My focus is on ensuring our engineering teams effectively bridge the gap between upstream open-source innovation and commercial reality.

Given our historical footprint in the open-source software ecosystem for Arm, there is a very high probability that Linaro has directly contributed to building the foundational technologies that OEMs are adopting today. However, open-source projects are designed by nature to drive rapid innovation, making them inherently general-purpose. Linaro acts as the trusted bridge and scaling partner between silicon vendors, raw open-source technologies, and the device makers who integrate them into final products.

Silicon vendors have traditionally built Linux Software Development Kits (SDKs) to accelerate the adoption of their silicon. However, upcoming regulations like the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) place immense new liabilities and long-term maintenance requirements on those very SDKs. Crucially, silicon vendors do not aspire to become software vendors; they rely on Linaro to be their strategic software partner. Linaro Solutions and Services solves this industry friction point by working closely with these vendors to translate their hardware-enablement bundles into secure, production-grade reference images that OEMs and Original Device Manufacturers (ODMs) can confidently adopt right away.

What are the defining technical and operational pressures facing your sector right now - and where do you see the industry underestimating the challenge?

The defining pressure is shifting from purely "building features" to "ensuring compliance and longevity," heavily driven by upcoming regulations like the EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA).

While industries like medical, aerospace, and defense have always maintained rigorous standards for software robustness and security, other sectors have used open source software simply to accelerate time-to-market—sometimes cutting corners on maintenance. The industry is vastly underestimating the operational and legal shift required by the CRA, particularly regarding the silicon supply chain.

Standard silicon vendor Linux SDKs are fantastic for early prototyping, but they are not built to absorb the long-term legal liabilities and decade-long security maintenance cycles the CRA now mandates. Because silicon vendors focus on hardware innovation rather than operating system lifecycle management, they cannot carry this burden alone. You can no longer ship an unmainlined chip-vendor kernel and forget it; ongoing lifecycle and vulnerability management is now a legal mandate for the entire ecosystem, requiring a dedicated software scaling partner.

Which application areas or end markets present the strongest near-term opportunity for your technology, and what is driving that demand?

While the push toward responsible, secure open-source adoption is happening across the board, the strongest near-term opportunities are in sectors undergoing profound architectural transformations—specifically Automotive, Robotics, and next-generation Consumer/Prosumer devices.

These industries are rapidly moving away from legacy, dedicated hardware configurations toward centralized, virtualized, and software-defined solutions. A fantastic reflection of this shift in the consumer space is our public collaboration to support Valve in its mission to build Linux-powered gaming devices. Whether it’s software-defined vehicles, commercial drones, or immersive VR/AR architectures, the market is demanding high-performance, predictable open-source stacks capable of handling intensive workloads on modern silicon.

Which emerging technologies or engineering approaches are you backing for the next three to five years - and what would it take for them to cross from promising to mainstream?

We heavily back several converging pillars:

• Software-Defined Everything (SDx): This will be the main driver improving open-source virtualization software (like KVM, Xen, QEMU, and virtio) for real-world edge deployment.
• Confidential Compute: To make SDx mainstream, we need robust lifecycle management for confidential virtual payloads to protect data at the hardware level.
• VR/AR, Drones, and Prosumer Edge Architectures: Driven by massive industry leaps in gaming, autonomous drones, and prosumer tech, we are actively optimizing for high-throughput, low-latency graphic and compute subsystems. Our recent collaboration on the open-source Linux development for the Steam Frame highlights this shift. For spatial computing and VR/AR to become fully mainstream, the underlying open-source ecosystem needs to deliver desktop-grade performance and optimization natively on power-efficient hardware.
• Edge vs. Fog AI Architecture: The industry is searching for the sweet spot between running efficient, use-case-tailored LLMs directly on edge devices versus offloading to more powerful models in confidential private clouds.

Events like Microelectronics UK bring together engineers, researchers, and industry decision-makers under one roof. How valuable is that kind of in-person concentration of expertise to you and your team?

It is incredibly valuable. Linaro thrives on community and collaboration, and while code is written remotely, alignment happens in person. Events like Microelectronics UK foster a deeper level of connection between industry stakeholders. That face-to-face concentration of expertise allows us to move past high-level talking points, dig into the actual technical roadblocks companies are facing, and build more fruitful, long-term relationships.

What do you want engineers and technical buyers to come away understanding about Linaro after speaking with you at the show - and what conversations are you expecting to have on the floor?

Linaro is widely recognized as a powerhouse within the upstream open-source community, but we want to change how technical buyers view our commercial productization role.

We want the audience to understand that Linaro bridges the gap between silicon vendor SDKs and the long-term realities faced by device makers. We support the entire product lifecycle—from R&D to testing, regulatory compliance, deployment, and long-term maintenance.

Crucially, a central pillar of our value proposition is our unique ability to represent OEM requirements directly to the broader open-source community. We inherently and naturally tend toward contributing non-differentiating features back to upstream projects. This ensures that the custom elements an OEM needs to move to production become part of the mainline codebase, eliminating the threat of fragile software forks. On the floor, we expect to have highly practical conversations about how companies can navigate the CRA using our production-grade reference images, manage mixed-criticality systems via virtualization, and secure their software-defined roadmaps across industrial, automotive, and high-performance consumer sectors.

Is there a leader, engineer, or mentor who has shaped how you approach your work - and what is the most enduring lesson you took from them?

Rather than a single person, our philosophy is deeply shaped by the organizations that successfully commercialized open source for the enterprise—most notably, Red Hat.

Red Hat proved that you could take community-driven open-source projects, make them predictable, secure, and enterprise-grade, and become an indispensable industry foundation. The enduring lesson we take from that model is that commercial industries need a trusted curator. Linaro aspires to be that exact scaling force, translating the chaotic innovation of open source into stable, secure realities for the IoT, embedded, automotive, and consumer electronics industries.

What does the next 12 months look like for Linaro - in terms of product direction, capability expansion, or where you are focusing development resource?

Our roadmap for the next year centres on compliance, software-defined ecosystems, and secure AI:

• CRA Readiness: We are heavily focusing development resources on helping industries smoothly adopt and comply with the new Cyber Resilience Act mandates.
• SDx Expansion: We are accelerating our regional engineering contributions toward Software-Defined Vehicles, Software-Defined Robotics, and high-fidelity embedded spaces like VR/AR and drones—building on the momentum of major consumer partnerships like our work with Valve.
• Confidential-Centric AI: We are actively developing an internal and partner-facing AI toolkit. This will allow our engineers and customers to leverage the massive productivity gains of generative AI and LLMs without ever compromising proprietary data or intellectual property confidentiality.