• Wednesday, 14 May 12:30 - 12:55 (Europe/Lisbon)
• Your timezone: Wednesday, 14 May 12:30 - 12:55 (Europe/Lisbon)
• Keynote room | Floriana II

Operating System software is often closely tied to hardware, firmware, and the deployed distribution and build infrastructure. Even minor changes in the boot chain can necessitate corresponding kernel adjustments. Similarly, small modifications in hardware and firmware may require OS updates, which can be time-consuming. In 2020, Arm introduced the Arm SystemReady (SR) program with the aim to standardize software for Arm based systems such that an OS can run out-of-the-box with different firmware and hardware platforms. Qualcomm offers multiple reference and development boards which can be utilized across different domains for industrial, IOT use cases, such as assembly line management, robotics, handheld devices to name a few. Our current initiative aims to achieve SR compliance for Qualcomm platforms. This would help enable the diverse developer community to install different OS images on Qualcomm platforms with essential functionalities, thus accelerating custom development for external developers with their preferred infrastructure. Based on the device market segment and required functionalities, SR categorizes the program into different bands and defines the minimal requirements to be met at system architecture, firmware and OS level to maintain forward and backward compatibility. Since SystemReady IR (IOT) band caters to devices in embedded Linux ecosystem, it has been chosen as the target band for Qualcomm boards. In our presentation, we would focus on the challenges encountered while making the Qualcomm platform SR compliant from Linux kernel perspective. SR necessitates to boot at least three distinct UEFI distributions images from different heritages on the targeted platform. So, the first step was to identify appropriate distributions. Since, OpenSUSE, Fedora and Ubuntu distributions follow Base Boot Requirement mandated by IR, these distributions were selected to establish Linux kernel support. Establishing support in distros required enablement of kernel configurations essential for Qualcomm platforms. Next step was to add the required support to platform device-tree in Linux upstream mainline while maintaining the device-tree specification and schema compliance. Multiple issues were observed while executing ACS and BSA test suite validations. We would discuss the problems encountered and solicit feedback on efficiently handling such issues on succeeding platforms.