Open Source Summit + ELC Europe 2018

Booting and embedded systems are not always simple. Even though most platforms have U-Boot firmware, each one has slightly different behavior with regard to installing and booting an OS. In addition, the embedded boot flow uses entirely different interfaces when compared to the general purpose server and desktop ecosystems. All this adds up to requiring custom enablement for each platform, which is not viable for most OS distribution projects.

The Embedded Base Boot Requirements (EBBR) project is a new effort to define a standard for booting embedded platforms that is supportable by the existing OS ecosystem. EBBR specifies a subset of the UEFI standard that can be implemented with upstream U-Boot and takes into account design patterns common on embedded systems. In this session, we'll discuss the goals of the EBBR project, the state of the EBBR document right now, and the progress to creating EBBR reference platforms using existing QEMU models and popular development boards.