Hi, and welcome to the Arm 'What is' program series. In each episode, we bring you a tech topic
to give you insight and perspective in the some of today's hottest design trends. I'm Brian Fuller,
editor-in-chief at Arm. And today we're gonna find out what is Arm SystemReady?
And to help us with that, I want to introduce Dong Wei,
standards architect and Fellow with Arm's architecture and technology group.
When he is not helping us understand what is Arm SystemReady, Dong is responsible for the
platform architecture specifications for Arm based systems. He serves on the boards of many
industry standards bodies include the PCI SIG, CXL Consortium and UEFI Forum. He's also an
incubation committee member of the Open Compute Project Foundation. So let's dive right in.
Dong, what exactly is Arm SystemReady?
Arm SystemReady is a compliance certification program based on a set of minimum hardware and
firmware requirements, based system architecture, be ESA or the base boot requirements (BBR)
plus a selection of supplements. Certified system
provide confidence that operating systems and subsequently layers of software would just work.
What's the goal? What's the purpose of Arm SystemReady?
Well, the purpose of this Arm SystemReady is to enable the Arm based systems to be easily
and widely deployed. To get there, the users must have the experience that software would just work.
This is actually challenging in the horizontally integrated markets
where one company does not own the complete hardware and software stack.
On the one hand, we must provide sufficient hardware and firmware standardization
that the operating systems can depend upon. Otherwise it would be cost prohibitive to
maintain and support the software. That must be customized per system.
On the other hand, we need to make sure our architecture's core value proposition
of innovation and differentiation is enabled for our partners.
We must struck a balance. This is why we define the minimum hardware and firm requirements
expected by the operating systems and then innovations and difference can be added on top.
Does Arm SytemReady already cover all devices?
Arm SystemReady is designed to cover devices based on the Arm v8 and v9 A- profile CPU architecture.
We actually started the effort initially on servers with the original ServerReady
program that we launched in 2018. Since then we realized that some hyperscalors
have different firmware requirements for servers. And we have extended the coverage to the edge
and IoT devices, including SmartNICs. This led to the SystemReady program that we launched in 2020.
We also certified a few workstations as well as a reference development platform targeting
the software-defined vehicles. SystemReady is intentionally designed to be flexible
to cover other devices as the market needs to expand.
We establish the baseline minimum hardware requirements called BSA as the foundation,
different market segments and different operating system have different firmware requirements
and may need supplement hardware require we do not have one solution that fits all.
Currently we have four beds: SR and LS for the server market, IR and ES for the embedded market.
SR is a super set of ES, which is in turn a super set of IR. So a device that can be
ES certified does not need to be IR certified, unless of course it needs to support
a specific OS that required firmware interfaces like Devicetree.
In addition, we also have a security interface extension that covers the support
of secure booth, secure firmware update and trusted platform modules, interfaces.
So Dong, SoCs in the edge and IoT markets are said to be not compliant to BSA today,
what is Arm doing to help address that?
Well Arm is working with the EDA vendors and Silicon providers
on a pre-silicon compliance program to verify the PSA and SVSA compliance before tape out. For the
current generations of the SoCs already on the market, we also have created waiver policies
in the IR and ES band certifications. We have worked with the partners on the
firmware and in some cases operating system workarounds with limited capabilities.
So what's been the industry's reaction to Arm SystemReady?
Oh, we have actually received strong support in the ecosystem for the operating system vendors,
silicon providers, EDA vendors, independent firmware vendors, OEMs/ODMs.
So far, we actually have already issued over 40 certifications to these devices.
Well, thanks, Dong. It sounds like Arm SystemReady is a vital way to accelerate
design innovation today. Now check out all our other 'What is' episodes here and be sure to
subscribe to the channel because we'll be adding more as the year progresses. Thanks for listening!