ARM Participation to the Symbian Foundation

Symbian is the market leading open operating system for mobile handsets. Terminal manufacturers have brought dozens of Symbian OS devices to the market over the last 10+ years and hundreds of millions of instances of the OS running are running on phones in people's pockets today. The term Smartphone is synonymous with Symbian.

The project to bring Symbian OS, along with the UI frameworks: S60, UIQ and MOAP(S), into the open source domain and under the umbrella of the Symbian Foundation Platform represents the largest and most complex operation of its type ever. The years of experience that have gone into producing millions of lines of optimized, tuned and extremely high quality code is adding significant and sustainable richness to the open source movement as it truly takes off in the mobile market.

Symbian OS, and its UI frameworks, have been exclusively deployed on the ARM^® architecture since their inception. Symbian and ARM have a long history of co-innovation that has increased the performance and feature set of Symbian mobile handsets instigating many of the benefits that mobile phone users take for granted today. ARM is a member of the Symbian Foundation and actively participates within the Architecture Council. Our goal is to ensure that the Symbian Platform remains at the cutting edge of software innovation on the ARM Architecture.

The ARM Advantage

Symbian Tools

Related Products

Resources

The Symbian releases complement the following ARM technologies

Symbian^2

RVDS2.2 build for ARMv5 ISA
Texas Instruments OMAP3 low cost Baegle Board Reference platform including ARM Cortex-A8

Additional Features in Symbian^3

RVDS4.0 build for ARMv7 ISA
SMP Safe Kernel and Platform on ARMv7 SMP Platform
Mali (OpenGL ES 2.0) support in new graphics architecture

Additional Features in Symbian^4

RVDS 2.2 build for ARMv5 ISA (deprecation phase)
ARMv7 reference platform
ARM SMP Optimized Kernel and Platform on ARMv7 SMP Platform
First Implementation of SHAI software standardization
ARM CPU/GPU optimized Qt library as the basis of Direct UI

Additional Features in Symbian^5

ARM SMP Fully Optimized Kernel and Platform on ARMv7 SMP Platform
Further refinement of SHAI implementation

The ARM Compiler is the industry standard for the ARM architecture and has been continually developed over a period of more than 20 years. RVDS4.0 supports all current ARM architectures and processors (including the Thumb-2 instruction set and ARM Architecture v7) and is available free of charge to developers and companies with less than 20 employees.

To enable the development community Symbian Foundation is providing a complete development kit which can be downloaded from: http://developer.symbian.org/wiki/index.php/Category:Kernel_&_Hardware_Services

Consisting of the following:

Open source kernel and other complementary packages
High performance ARM compiler tool chain (RVCT4.0)
Open source base support package for the low cost TI Beagle Board (Cortex-A8)
Supporting binaries
Hardware execution environment

ARM Profiler

The ARM Profiler, part of RealView® Development Suite 4.0 Professional, is a unique product that enables non-intrusive analysis of embedded software performance for virtually unlimited periods of time, while running at operational frequencies of up to 450MHz. This means that the ARM Profiler can analyze device software that is processing a real work load for as long as is needed, be that minutes, hours or even days.

The ARM Profiler combines an intuitive user interface with analysis of software performance on hardware and fast models. This enables performance analysis to become an integral part of every embedded software developer’s day-to-day job. This greatly reduces the software project risks, which enables on-time and on-target project delivery

Application Processors

Multimedia

Tools

For Phone Development

For Application Development

In addition to all the commercially available tools listed above, ARM also supplies a version of RealView Develoment Suite free for Symbian Platform application development purposes.

News and Events

As part of the ongoing open source strategy, the Symbian Foundation has released the Platform Kernel under the Eclipse Public License and made it available to all.

At the same time ARM and the Symbian Foundation jointly announced that ARM was making RVDS, ARM's industry leading build tools, available for Symbian Foundation members at no cost for the purpose of application developement.

Symbian Foundation

The Symbian Foundation maintain an extensive set of web pages.

ARM is a member of the Foundation's Architecture Council. The landing page for the council details the council's remit, its areas of expertise and the issues that it has debated and voted on in the past.

The Architecture Council has set up the SHAI working group to take a look at re-factoring hardware dependent and generic code with a view to providing a consistent level of abstraction at the lower level in the Foundation Platform. ARM welcomes standardisation processes for software interfaces and so is active within this group.

The Symbian Foundation is a prolific blogger and has their own You Tube channel

Symbian Foundation Platform

Symbian Foundation releases are currently only available through membership of the Symbian Foundation and licensed under the Symbian Foundation License. The Foundation seeks to move to an open source model a will re-license all of the code under the Eclipse Public License and make it available to all, members and non-members alike. If an organization wishes to contribute to the Foundation Platform, then membership is a pre-requisite.

Symbian Foundation Platform Kits

The Symbian Foundation provides different development kits. The choice of kit is governed by whether you are an application or handset developer. Kits are available for a number of different Symbian Foundation Versions.