About ARM
Arm is a British semiconductor and software design company known for its expertise in developing wide range of microprocessor IP architecture and related technology. Their IPs are widely used in developing SoCs for various devices, including smartphones, tablets, IoT devices, embedded systems and cloud multicore servers. Arm’s energy-efficient and high-performance designs have made them a leader in the field of mobile and embedded computing, enabling a wide range of electronic products to deliver efficient and powerful processing capabilities.
Arm and PureSoftware Partnership
PureSoftware’s embedded software development on Arm processor-based hardware platform converges to create a dynamic synergy that drives innovation, enhances product performance, and security and shapes the future of connected technology.
Our approach is to empower businesses with advanced solutions that harness the full potential of Arm’s technology, enabling increased efficiency and intelligence in devices and systems across diverse industries.
Services Provided to Arm across multiple domains
Expertise in Arm Processors
SOC’s with different Arm cores like v8, v7, Cortex-A72, Cortex M4, NXP-LS1021A, NXP-iMX6, ARDUINO-UNO/NANO, Raspberry-Pi3 & Renesas based SOC’s
System Ready Certification Program
PureSoftware is a proud partner of Arm – System ready certification program. The compliance certification program tests firmware and certifies(BSA/BBR) that systems meet the System Ready standards enabling the software to work on Arm based hardware and providing confidence that operating systems (OS) and subsequent layers of software just work.
OSS Package Development for AARCH64 architecture
Infrastructure companies have continued to increase their use of software which needs more Open Source software that runs on Arm IP, but also optimize the software for Arm IP. These include feature and performance improvements and drivers.
PureSoftware migrated various OSS packages to support the ARM platform for packages to run on ARM chipset based SoC , utilizing Function as a Service (FAAS) for serverless cloud computing (e.g. LAMP Stack, Alpine OS Packages, and Docker images for the AARCH64 architecture). These were all ported, tested and then upstreamed to respective OSS public repositories for the customers to directly use the multi architecture enabled OSS packages and take advantage of community-driven new feature additions, fixes, performance, support, and security aspects.
PureSoftware ported about 100 docker images and upstreamed more than 2000 packages in different technologies to work on Linux, on AARCH64 multicore platforms. PureSoftware also worked on security modules for transport layer and booting, critical and complex packages like JIT, FFI, Assembler, Debugger, Security packages like Commons- crypto and OpenSSL.
Some of the critical OSS packages were made available to work on AARCH64 platforms for the first time and the main/subpackages were all aligned to latest mainline code base for different community git repositories.
Firmware support using UEFI and ACPI for the desktop market
PureSoftware developed and upstreamed firmware based on UEFI and ACPI standards, for NXP ARM Cortex-A72 based SoCs ( example sixteen multicores platform like LX2160A, and LS1046A), making sure UEFI can enable mainstream distros to run the hardware platforms.
The complete solution was tested on various hardware platforms and distros to ensure it works well. Additionally, introduced some new features along with supporting changes to UEFI+ACPI available, which wasn’t there in the Linux system before.
- The UEFI and ACPI firmware enabled the customer to bring up other Operating systems using WinPE and ESXi bare metal Virtualization platforms.
- The complete firmware developed for UEFI, ACPI, and Linux up streamed by PureSoftware to appropriate open-source sites.
Linux Kernel Development
The Linux kernel drivers and file system needs to be adopted to take advantage of UEFI based bootup options and PureSoftware supported and developed Linux kernel drivers compatible with UEFI run time services and align the legacy Linux drivers to work based on UEFI and UEFI boot methods(example PXE etc.)
