EBBR Notes 2018.04.05

5 April 2018

This was a kickoff meeting where we discussed what EBBR is intended to be. I've showed a few slides which can be found here:

Attendees (Skype said 13 people joined, but I didn't get quite that many names.):

We talked about the target audience for EBBR and how the project would progress. Below are some of the notes I captured on comments and questions.

From Tom:

We need to start writing down a list of requirements
It would be useful to have a reference implementation
- Bill added: Was discussed at Connect, and it would be good to have a QEMU configuration as one of the reference implementations.

Udit:

Will there be a compliance test suite?
- Tom: He will happily add any test cases to the U-Boot CI loop
- Bill: U-Boot CI testing is far more useful to him than a formal test suite

Bill:

I want this forum (EBBR) to be the place to dicuss things that all the vendors are doing, but doing in different ways. Want's to start defining common architecture.

Daniel:

Would like EBBR to Encourage sanity in SoC masked-boot roms
- Not feasible for EBBR Level 0 (because it will use existing hardware) but should provide guidance for future SoCs.
- Bill: Be aware that it may take 5 years before recommendations appear in silicon

Udit:

Peter:

Would like EBBR to cover both aarch32 and aarch64
- Alex concurs
General agreement that EBBR could be applicable to more than just Arm,
- Arm is the driver on this, but there is nothing that excludes other architectures.
- EBBR depends on other specs (ex. UEFI) to define ABI. Those specs will need to cover an architecture considered to be included in EBBR
- Udit - Big Endian platforms like PowerPC may be a problem
  - UEFI doesn't support big-endian

Alex:

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