The aarch64_efi_defconfig allows to build a minimal Linux system that can boot on all AArch64 servers providing an EFI firmware and ACPI. Building and booting ==================== $ make aarch64_efi_defconfig $ make The file output/images/disk.img is a complete disk image that can be booted, it includes the grub2 bootloader, Linux kernel and root filesystem. Testing under Qemu ================== This image can also be tested using Qemu: qemu-system-aarch64 \ -M virt \ -cpu cortex-a57 \ -m 512 \ -nographic \ -bios \ -drive file=output/images/disk.img,if=none,format=raw,id=hd0 \ -device virtio-blk-device,drive=hd0 \ -netdev user,id=eth0 \ -device virtio-net-device,netdev=eth0 Note that needs to point to a valid aarch64 UEFI firmware image for qemu. It may be provided by your distribution as a edk2-aarch64 or AAVMF package, in path such as /usr/share/edk2/aarch64/QEMU_EFI.fd .