A few months after the introduction of the Arduino/Genuino 101 Intel has now released the source code of the operating system that makes this board work. The package contains the Board Support Package (BSP) for the Curie system-on-chip (SoC). The firmware is intended to be built only on 64-bit Ubuntu systems.

The Arduino/Genuino 101 is a complicated beast built around the Curie SoC that combines an x86 processor with an ARC core. The ARC processor runs the Arduino sketches and communicates with the x86 processor that takes care of the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) stack and USB communication. Users now have full access to the source code that makes all this possible and are free to modify it all. Doing so is however a bit more involved than writing Arduino sketches and an incorrect mod can brick the board. Only a JTAG programmer will get you out of such a ditch.

The latest Arduino/Genuino 101 core libraries can be gotten from GitHub.

Here is a review of the Arduino/Genuino 101.