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That’s exactly why the Arm servers adopt the same specs or functional equivs to x86. A single binary distribution of an OS will boot on any SBSA compatible machine - because all the weird bits are hidden through ACPI, UEFI and PSCI. No BSPs.

I’d go as far as saying Arm servers are compatible to x86 designs at a platform level (eg. how PCIe and config space are wired up, how caches and DMA work, NUMA, SMP, MSI(X), and so on....

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Is there any hope that it could be used to some extent on smartphones? Or maybe there is a similar effort in that space?

I understand that some works may be hard to miniaturize.

IMO yes. Although SBSA and SBBR target the servers, already smaller gear (think vCPE, set top box and IoT gateway chips) are adopting the specs as well, and I anticipate adoption everywhere except devices where a) cost is everything b) power and perf need to be squeezed out even at the cost of maintainability. At some point following the everything-needs-its-own-BSP mentality for embedded SoCs will start hurting the bottom line, because there will be plenty of competitors willing to make more “normal”-looking gear.

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