Hi and welcome to the Arm "What is" program series. In each episode, we explore a tech
topic to give you insight and perspective into some of today's hottest design trends.
I'm Brian Fuller, editor-in-chief at Arm and today we're going to find out what is
Arm SystemReady. And to help us with that, I want to introduce the Olivier Bernard,
director of high-performance IoT with Arm's AI IoT group. When he's not helping us understand
what is Arm SystemReady, Oliver enjoys watching or playing ice hockey or teaching
TaeKwonDo with his kids at his dojo. So let's get started. Olivier, what exactly is Arm SystemReady?
So Arm SystemReady is a set of standards and certification program
that describes a defined interface between hardware and software, right?
Think of it as abstraction layers that ensure that generic off-the-shelf operating systems,
just land on just about any hardware. At the end of the day, SystemReady
allows to disassociate the hardware from the firmware and ensures that software just works.
So Olivier, why is this important for developers?
That's a great question. So today the embedded Linux ecosystem is very healthy.
It's used in just about every industry because it's flexible, it's got loads of functionality.
However, the software stack on most embedded devices is entirely custom. You have to bolt
it to the ground. And the OS is tied to the platform. Even the smallest changes means
rebuilding the entire image downloading, you know, the device and that's complicated. That
makes methods and features, especially security features that are always evolving very difficult,
very complicated, and really doesn't add a lot of value to the end-user. So that's not the best
energy and money spent by software developers. With SystemReady standards, it becomes a lot
easier and a lot cheaper to maintain multiple images on multiple products and application.
And this in the long run, and so today and tomorrow,
so you are building a future proof system. What, it also does, as I mentioned earlier,
is it disassociates the hardware and the software. So that means that people and users,
we haven't integrated can choose the best hardware platform for the application,
whether it's smart cities or smart building, and then they can use the best software
and the hardware platform developers can roll out in the field, their products, not having
to worry about how is my product going to be used, what software is going to be tied to it.
It's all independent. So it allows you to deploy your assets in the field
and land just about any operating system or application or container on it. And then lastly,
for OEMs, it allows you to have software portability and reusability across different
platforms. The world of cloud native and cloud system has been very successful
because it's got business principle, IT business oriented model software technology deployment.
We need to bring the same thing to the OT world, which is what IoT is mostly in today.
That's a great overview, Olivier. Can you describe
some of the elements of Arm SystemReady that can speed development time and how that happened?
There's really three components. There is a base system architecture,
which is BSA, which describes how the SoC the device is being built.
Then there is the BBR specification that describes how the system software,
the firmware is being integrated with the hardware to offer a complete solution so that developer
can for the application. And then we have this ACS Suite. The Architectural Compliance Suite
that test the whole system to make sure it's compliant and meets the specification.
And that's how you get your certification. But also as part of the certification,
we are also required to see landing report from unmodified image ISOs from
commercially available operating system. And that proves that it'll just work. Now
removing the customization, the fine tuning, the methods, the verification, and managing multiple
binaries for multiple platform - these are huge cost savings for ODMs and OEMs.
You can literally, for example, with Yocto, have one binary image and you have digital
banner image for all of your devices all the time. And you just download the differentials.
So already we're seeing some excellent momentum with SystemReady
because a lot of the outcomes that you've just told us about. Can you
give us a little bit of how you think Arm SystemReady might evolve in the coming years?
Arm SystemReady was originally designed for data centers and we still fantastic successes there
to unload the migration of work loads from cloud native to Arm-based servers. And that's
what we did. We saw that success and we decided why can't we take that success
to the edge? And that's how we created Project Cassini extending that SystemReady successes from
the cloud to the edge. Now, what you will see in the next 12 months is an evolution of the stack.
We've put as much as we could today in the current spec that we released, but there's much
more we can do. So over the next 12 months, you will see different roll-outs of specifications.
In addition today, SystemReady, only applies to Cortex-A,
lingua from Arm, , which are applications processors and embedded Linux.
But we see that for the complete edge, including the constrained embedded devices and MCU.
So to that extent, what we did is we introduced at Arm DevSummit, Project Centauri,
which is an extension of Project Cassini, but for the far edge and for MCUs and RTOSes.
Well, Olivier, this is clearly a huge step forward and accelerating system development,
so thanks for telling us about it.
We really appreciate it. Now, check out all our other, "What is" episodes here and be sure to
subscribe to this channel because we'll be adding more as the year progresses. Thanks for listening!