Linux and UEFI: Linaro and LinuxCon

This week I've spent hanging around Linaro Connect 2013 USA, which is dedicated to bringing all of the open-source (and Linux) goodness to the ARM platform. For the 64-bit ARM architecture (AArch64), they have been promoting UEFI for quite a while but Linaro and its members are doing a lot of the really hard work of making sure that is a reality, with engineers dedicated to working from the reset vector up through the Linux kernel and into some server applications, making sure that all the necessary bits are there in open source. There were a lot of sessions this week that deal with the thorny issues of UEFI (secure boot), power management (PSCI) and ACPI (interaction with existing drivers and FDT).  To top it off, this event was co-located with ARM TechCon which doubled the fun, including an interesting keynote by Simon Segars, CEO or ARM.

This follows on the heels of the UEFI Plugfest, which was co-located also, but with LinuxCon in New Orleans. My colleague, Jeff Wheeler from Insyde got to attend, and he found folks interested in the question, "Does it really work?" And the answer was, "Yes, it does" This is the impression I recently found from  Bruno Cornec's blog article "First UEFI PlugFest for Linuxers". Good communication, good testing and, more importantly, UEFI and Linux work together.

The relationship between Linux and UEFI has not always been easy, with conspiracy theories and suspicious kicking of tires. But these two events have shown that they can and do work together, on x86 and ARM.