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Robustness of Arm’s Developer Ecosystem underpinned by reference platforms based on standards

Imran Yusuf
Imran Yusuf
October 6, 2020
4 minute read time.

At Arm, we are dedicated to promoting an ecosystem that is diverse and vibrant, and that delivers value to our customers and developer community. We strive to embrace and empower partners of all sizes and help them succeed in the market with their products. Our approach is based on fostering collaboration among developers, standard groups and open-source projects that deliver proof points to promote open hardware and software that just works. As a supplier of key technology and IP, Arm’s success relies on our partners products that go into all market segments such as data centers, infrastructure edge, IoT and so on. Thus, our primary responsibility as an Arm ecosystem is to help partners get to market quicker, increase the total available market for their products, and unleash the power of the software from our OSV and ISVs to runs seamlessly across a rich set of hardware from our silicon, OEM, and ODM partners.

We are privileged to be collaborating with the Arm developer community, who has been making phenomenal contributions in helping Arm become first class citizens across sectors of the key markets we serve. We continuously work on providing the best out of the box experience for software to work on Arm. As proof points, at this year’s DevSummit, we are announcing platforms from SolidRun and Raspberry Pi Foundation that are participating in the Arm SystemReady program. The vision of Arm SystemReady is for software to work on Arm “A”-class based devices. With the availability of these platforms, there are immediate benefits to the ecosystem and end customers.

Why these platforms matter:

  • Both the RiP4 and HoneyComb platforms provide choices for developers working on data center or non-data center use cases. Being part of the Arm SystemReady program, our vision is that software just works and that we make it frictionless to run workloads on these platforms. Arm is also helping developers using these platforms with match making and go-to-market opportunities with partners that fall into the below categories.
  • No vendor lock-in. Both the RiP4 and SolidRun platforms allow our developers to focus on value-add differentiation without being locked into a distribution since the OSes work on these platforms. This also helps developers expand their markets because OSes that are certified on these platforms support different workloads.
  • With the availability of these two platforms, developers interested in workstation and ATX form factor, Solidrun’s HoneyComb platform based on NXP’s latest Layerscape 2160A chipset is available as a complete system and as a reference board. For your single board computer, we are thrilled to have the RiP4 platform that is already Arm SystemReady certified for our developers.

What can users expect from SolidRun’s HoneyComb:

SolidRun’s HoneyComb LX2K unlocks the potential of the hardware platform by removing the limitation of the platforms that run on it. Developers can run an environment that is most native to their workflow and rather than tinker with a custom Boot Support Package (BSP), instead focus on developing application layer software and products. The Arm ecosystem while vibrant and thriving has always been missing a core component which is software was developed for the architecture rather than directly on it.

HoneyComb with its 16 cores and up to 64 GBs of memory provides the capabilities to develop natively on the architecture that will drive the next wave of Edge and Cloud innovation. Plug and play high-speed connectivity with PCIe and USB 3.0 allow device drivers to be developed, tested, and debugged. Applications destined to be scaled on AArch64 cloud or edge deployments can be developed and benchmarked locally by taking advantage of the 10Gbps+ networking to identify possible throughput bottlenecks more easily. All of these options are unlocked with a single hardware solution. The HoneyComb is a swiss army knife for both hardware and software developers who are focused on building things for the Arm architecture.

Because our LX2160A implementation is based on the ComExpress Type 7 standard board interface, any custom carrier boards that are designed to use it benefits from the certification. All of the standards based hardware compatibility is built in the CEX7 module itself, therefore any connectivity that can be brought out to carriers, like our higher end ClearFog CX carrier, will also have the same guaranteed software compatibility. This lets products based on the LX2160A CEX7 scale up or down with connectivity and features, but with only a few changes to firmware, retain all the same OS compatibility.

Visit Arm Infrastructure Developer Site

Partner Endorsements:

“SolidRun is very excited to be adopting Arm SystemReady program onto our current and future solutions. What we love about standardizing hardware and firmware with this program is that it allows our customers to not be forced into a specific Linux distribution or embedded OS. They can use the specific distribution they are most comfortable with, reducing the learning curve and bringing products based on our hardware to market quicker and cheaper. This combined with security infrastructure that is being built on top of the standards will accelerate the implementation of secure, stable, upgradeable Edge and IoT products.”  Jon Nettleton, Chief Solutions Architect, SolidRun.

“Raspberry Pi is pleased to endorse Project Cassini initiative and to see Arm SystemReady compliance certification program extending beyond servers to cover devices across a vibrant and diverse hardware ecosystem. Through promoting widely adopted standards this program recognizes the importance of the developers and community contributions in accelerating adoption of hardware standards that benefit the entire ecosystem. We look forward leveraging the fruits of this program for developers and technology enthusiasts all over the world.” Eben Upton, CEO, Raspberry Pi (Trading) Ltd.

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