Introduction
Renesas is excited to announce the RZ/G2M-HiHope Reference Board has recently been certified by Arm® as a SystemReady IR-compliant platform.
What Is Arm SystemReady IR?
Arm SystemReady is a set of standards and a compliance certification program that enable interoperability with generic, off-the-shelf operating systems and is hypervisor domain-specific so that software “just works”. SystemReady comes in a number of domain-specific ‘flavors’. The IR variant achieved by the RZ/G2M, verifies it as a futureproof solution for embedded IoT and edge sector devices, ensuring true interoperability with embedded Linux and other embedded operating systems, and fast-tracking customer development.
Published details of the Renesas RZ/G2M SystemReady Certification may be found here SystemReady IR – Arm®
SystemReady IR for Renesas RZ/G2M
This SystemReady IR certification completion for Renesas industrial-focused RZ devices demonstrates a commitment by Renesas to provide software solutions that allow developers to focus on making their products innovative, by reducing the investment needed to bring up a platform ready for Linux. This certification marks the first of many Renesas platforms destined for compliance with the Arm program.
Most embedded software tends to be highly customized. The underlying software and OS are dedicated to a particular platform, and there may often be significant overhead required to make small changes for fixes and/or improvements, or to reflect changes in the underlying hardware. By adapting the existing Renesas RZ software package components to support mandatory open standard interfaces and features, the comprehensive compliance test suite from Arm can ultimately be executed with zero failures. The subsequent clean booting of at least two standard OS distribution images “out of the box” confirms the platform’s full compliance.
The RZ/G2M has been verified with Standard Linux distributions from Debian and OpenSUSE, with support for other distributions in the pipeline. Ensuring compatibility and interoperability with the ecosystem removes the early end-user effort needed to be ready to develop differentiating software layers on Linux. In addition, it brings with it the further benefits of forming one of the three key building blocks of Arm’s Project Cassini, combined, with reference applications, and security certification to enable seamless cloud-native deployments to the RZ/G2M.
The Arm SystemReady IR certification of the Renesas RZ/G2M demonstrates a future-focused commitment by Renesas to provide systems that “just work” with the Linux ecosystem, operating systems (OS) and software stacks. In addition, verifying platform requirements for long-term software support and maintenance ensures that the platform can receive regular updates, bug fixes, and security patches. This ensures that developers have continuous access to a stable and reliable software system.
In short, the compliance program helps address both the functionality and increasing complexity, and the real-world concerns in developing platforms with cloud connectivity.
Renesas RZ/G2M Reference Platform
The HiHope RZ/G2M (hihope-rzg2m) is manufactured by Jiangsu HopeRun Software Co., Ltd. and uses the Renesas RZ/G2M SoC. More information about the platform can be found on the HiHope RZ/G2M product page.
The HiHope RZ/G2M platform consists of three parts:
- Renesas RZ/G2M (r8a774a1) SoC
- HopeRun HiHope RZ/G2M platform
- HopeRun expansion board for HiHope RZ/G2 platforms (optional)
