Samer El-Haj-Mahmoud

Samer El-Haj-Mahmoud

Samer El-Haj-Mahmoud is a Sr. Principal Architect at Arm Architecture and Technology Group, working on firmware architecture, industry standards, and the Arm SystemReady certification program. His work focuses on Arm infrastructure enablement from cloud to edge. He leads and contributes to industry standards bodies, including the UEFI Forum, DMTF, OCP, CXL Consortium, and the Arm System Architecture Advisory Council (SystemArchAC).

Arm LBBR requirements for open source LinuxBoot firmware

The Base Boot Requirements (BBR) specification defines standard firmware interfaces for OS and Hypervisors boot on Arm 64-bit based systems. It builds on Arm’s standards-based approach for systems design. The BBR specification defines multiple “recipes” to accommodate different requirements across various operating systems and use cases, regardless of the segments. The LBBR recipe is defined specifically for Arm servers using LinuxBoot based firmware. LinuxBoot (https://www.linuxboot.org/) is an open-source project to replace certain UEFI stages with a Linux kernel and runtime. The LBBR recipe is created to address the needs of hyperscalers and CSPs, where LinuxBoot is often a business requirement. In this presentation, we will highlight the latest developments in defining the LBBR recipe, and show how LinuxBoot can be implemented on Arm systems to be compliant with the requirements. We will also explain how the LBBR recipe is used to build SystemReady LS compliant servers. Finally, we will demonstrate open source proof of concept implementations of LBBR compatible firmware on different devices.