Firmware standards such as UEFI and ACPI are one of the foundational pillars for Arm servers, and a major reason for the continued growth of this horizontally-integrated ecosystem. Non-server “Edge” systems, however, are still an embedded-style vertically-integrated market, which prevents at-scale adoption and proliferation of Arm-based Edge/IoT Compute. At the Spring 2020 UEFI Plugfest, Arm’s Senior Principal Architect Samer El-Haj-Mahmoud and I gave a talk on making “Arm Edge” as boring as “Arm Servers”, staring with the iconic Raspberry Pi.
Similar to the Linaro Tech Days talk before it, this is a presentation and demo of VMware’s and Arm’s joint open effort to bring Arm ServerReady experiences to the Raspberry Pi 4 via community-developed SBBR (UEFI + ACPI) firmware. The session covers the history of the Pi UEFI port, current status and technical challenges that remain to be solved.
