The first SystemReady IR product, the NXP i.MX 8M Mini EVK has been certified, leading the charge towards a consistent and best–in–class cloud native experience at the IoT edge.
The IoT edge plays an increasingly crucial role in supporting diverse use cases with a range of power and performance requirements. The traditional IoT deployment model has been to generate data through sensors in large volume, where cost and power consumption is key, then to get insights and act on data in the cloud, where all the smarts are with quasi unlimited resources in power, compute and storage capacity.
As the IoT scales in its billions, that model is no longer sustainable because of the sheer amount of data to be transmitted and an infrastructure that is unable to scale as fast. To deliver sustainable services at scale, the IoT must embrace cloud-native software principles, consistently and securely enabling distributed compute models from the cloud to endpoints.
To address this, Arm announced Project Cassini in 2019, an industrywide initiative that tackles two major roadblocks to IoT deployment: scalability and fragmentation. It does this by enabling the migration of workloads from the cloud closer to the source of the data while creating a consistent, homogenous, modern deployment model for target applications across our application processor portfolio. Therefore, this evolution of IoT demands a new deployment model that makes it simpler to scale software and applications, a model, like the one used in the cloud, that “just works.”
What Defines Cloud-Native IoT Edge Devices?
- NETWORK-CONNECTED, MANAGED
- RUNS GENERAL PURPOSE OPERATING SYSTEM
- SUPPORTS VIRTUALIZATION
- IMPLEMENTS HARDWARE ROOT-OF-TRUST
- DEVICE-FUNCTION AGNOSTIC
Every journey starts with one small first step. With the announcement of the first SystemReady IR certified product, the i.MX 8M Mini EVK, NXP is leading the journey for the whole IoT industry. By certifying the EVK, NXP laid the groundwork for the i.MX 8M family and demonstrated that anyone that uses the i.MX 8M family of devices with the associated Board Support Package (BSP) can build platforms that will pass the same certification process and hence boot industry leading Linux distributions with minimal integration effort.
SystemReady IR is a band of SystemReady compliance certification for devices in the IoT edge sector that are built around SoCs based on the Arm A-profile architecture. Following the SystemReady standards ensures interoperability with embedded Linux, enables industry Linux distributions to boot with minimal integration effort and ensures that software higher-up the stack ‘just works.’ To achieve that, SystemReady IR-certified platforms implement a minimum set of hardware and firmware features that an operating system can depend on to deploy the operating system image.
It is part of the wider SystemReady program aiming to test and certify that systems meet the minimum standards, for confidence that specified operating systems and subsequent layers of software will just work, across a broad range of Arm-based devices.
We invite everyone looking into developing platforms for IoT to check out the NXP certified release to assess and capture the huge opportunity at hand.
| Company | NXP |
| System |
NXP i.MX8M Mini EVK |
| SoC family | i.MX8M Mini |
| Errata | Certification Errata |
| Firmware version |
NXP 2021 Q2 pre-release firmware, version LF 5.10.35 2.0.0 rc1 |
| ACS version | ACS-IR v0.8 BETA 0 |
| BSA details |
BSA v1.0 |
| BBR details |
EBBR v2.0.1 (BBR v1.0) |
| Arm SystemReady certification | SystemReady IR v1.0 (level 0) |
| Tested operating systems | • Fedora IoT 34 • OpenSUSE Tumbleweed snapshot20210616 • Debian testing arm64 DVD weekly build of 20210621 |
https://developer.arm.com/architectures/system-architectures/arm-systemready/ir
What is Project Cassini?
Project Cassini is an open, collaborative, standards-based initiative in partnership with our ecosystem, to ensure a cloud-native experience across a diverse and secure IoT edge ecosystem.
Project Cassini is built from three foundational components:
- Robust standards that allow for leveraged software development, while enabling hardware diversity to thrive, through the Arm SystemReady certification program
- Security APIs and certification programs trusted by developer communities and across workloads, through PSA Certified and PARSEC
- Reference solutions for a cloud native IoT edge, developed in partnership with the ecosystem
Summary
For Silicon Partners, ODMs, OEMs, ISVs, System Integrators and developers, Project Cassini unlocks the edge and IoT compute opportunity, by accelerating deployment of cloud native applications across diverse Arm platforms. The project promotes a secure, standards-driven baseline for Arm-based platforms at the IoT edge.
To unlock the value of IoT, Arm is committed to continue investing in and working with all ecosystem partners on developing these platform standards and reference systems. We invite all partners to join us for closer collaboration in these areas, and to work together to create, enhance and bring differentiated solutions to market.
This NXP i.MX 8M Mini EVK SystemReady IR certification is the first in the industry, signaling the start of the race for many more to follow.
Together we are building the future of Cloud Native IoT and Edge.
