We have made Arm servers boring.
Jon Masters
Standards are boring. Satisfied users may not want to migrate to other boards the market tries to sell them.
So Arm market is flooded with piles of small board computers (SBC). Often they are compliant to standards only when it comes to connectors.
But our hardware is not standard
It is not a matter of ‘let produce UEFI ready hardware’ but rather ‘let write EDK2 firmware for boards we already have’.
Look at Raspberry/Pi then. It is shitty hardware but got popular. And group of people wrote UEFI firmware for it. Probably without vendor support even.
Start with EBBR
Each new board should be EBBR compliant at start. Which is easy — do ‘whatever hardware’ and put properly configured U-Boot on it. Upstreaming support for your small device should not be hard as you often base on some already existing hardware.
Add 16MB of SPI flash to store firmware. Your users will be able to boot ISO without wondering where on boot media they need to write bootloaders.
Then work on EDK2 for board. Do SMBIOS (easy) and keep your existing Device Tree. You are still EBBR. Remember about upstreaming your work — some people will complain, some will improve your code.
Add ACPI, go SBBR
Next step is moving from Device Tree to ACPI. May take some time to understand why there are so many tables and what ASL is. But as several other systems show it can be done.
And this brings you to SBBR compliance. Or SystemReady ES if you like marketing.
SBSA for future design
Doing new SoC tends to be “let us take previous one and improve a bit”. So this time change it a bit and make your next SoC compliant with SBSA level 3. All needed components are probably already included in your Arm license.
Grab EDK2 support you did for previous board. Look at QEMU SBSA Reference Platform support, look at other SBSA compliant hardware. Copy, reuse their drivers, their code.
Was it worth?
At the end you will have SBSA compliant hardware running SBBR compliant firmware.
Congratulations, your board is SystemReady SR compliant. Your marketing team may write that you are on same list as Ampere with their Altra server.
Users buy your hardware and can install whatever BSD, Linux distribution they want. Some will experiment with Microsoft Windows. Others may work on porting Haiku or other exotic operating system.
But none of them will have to think “how to get this shit running”. And they will tell friends that your device is as boring as it should be when it comes to running OS on it == more sales.