Genesi is an international group of technology and consulting companies in the United States, Mexico and Germany. It is most widely known for designing and manufacturing ARM architecture and Power ISA computing devices. The Genesi Group consists of Genesi USA Inc., Genesi Americas LLC, Genesi Europe UG, Red Efika, bPlan GmbH and the affiliated non-profit organization Power2People. Genesi is an official Linaro partner and its software development team has been instrumental in moving Linux on the ARM architecture towards a wider adoption of the hard-float application binary interface, which is incompatible with most existing applications but provides enormous performance gains for many use cases.
Products
The main products of Genesi are ARM-based computers that were designed to be inexpensive, quiet and highly energy efficient, and a custom Open Firmware compliant firmware. All products can run a multitude of operating systems.
Current products include
Aura - A comprehensive abstraction layer for embedded and desktop devices, with UEFI and IEEE1275. Desktop systems with AGP or PCI/PCI Express may take advantage of an embedded x86/BIOS emulator providing boot functionality for standard graphics cards.
EFIKA MX53
EFIKA MX6
Discontinued products include
EFIKA MX Smarttop - A highly energy efficient and compact computing device powered by a Freescale ARM iMX515 CPU.
EFIKA MX Smartbook - A 10" smartbook powered by the Freescale ARM iMX515 CPU.
Open Desktop Workstation – A Pegasos II based Computer featuring a Freescale PowerPC 7447 processor. Complete specifications for the hardware are available through Genesi's PowerDeveloper.org website.
Community support
Genesi designed and maintains PowerDeveloper, an online platform for Genesi products and ARM products from other manufacturers. Via the PowerDeveloper Projects programs, hundreds of systems have been provided to the PowerDeveloper community so far, thereby supporting open source development in many countries. Linux distributions that directly benefited from the programs include but are not limited to Crux, Debian, Raspbian, Fedora, Gentoo, openSuSE and Ubuntu. Genesi once funded the development of the MorphOSoperating system but shifted its focus towards Linux in 2004. However, Genesi remains the main supporter of the operating system and continues to actively support its user and developer communities via the MorphZone social platform, which features discussion forums, a digital library, a software repository and a bounty system.
