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The approach here for 64-bit ARM on servers has been to say "it must run UEFI". Then the vendor-specifics get dealt with by UEFI and ACPI, and the kernel can si
by pm215 9y ago
The approach here for 64-bit ARM on servers has been to say "it must run UEFI". Then the vendor-specifics get dealt with by UEFI and ACPI, and the kernel can simply assume those facilities exist (and the distro can install new kernels in the usual UEFI way without having to know how to flash them into 500 different bootloaders). You can argue the merits and demerits of UEFI (and people do!) but there's a lot of benefit in pushing for "all server hardware must work like this".
- mtgx 9y agoWhy not Coreboot?
- tscs37 9y agoWhy core boot? Uefi is open source (edk, tiano) if you make it so. Coreboot is also very x86 centric last I checked.
- mtgx 9y agoIsn't UEFI way more complex? But I'm not sure if that's a problem because of Windows and all the drivers it has to support, or if it's a problem with the specification. I believe it was the latter? I think Google mentioned that in its recent talk on removing Intel ME.
- tscs37 9y agoUEFI is more complex but also nicer for management. Developing a runtime on UEFI is easy to setup and get going, you don't have that feature in coreboot.
- subway 9y agoCoreboot has some pretty solid ARM support too. Modern Chromebooks (both x86 and ARM) use Coreboot with a "depthcharge" payload. You can even use Libreboot at this point to bring up an RK3288, and boot into ChromeOS or a traditional linux. Even cooler is that if you do your own build of Coreboot, you can provide your own OS verification keys, and use vbutil to sign your own OS and have custom verified boot.
- phkahler 9y ago>> Coreboot is also very x86 centric last I checked. Actually RISC-V is fully supported: https://riscv.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Tues1345-riscvcoreboot.pdf https://riscv.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Tues1345-riscvc... Real hardware coming soon...
- monocasa 9y agoThere isn't much abstraction of the underlying hardware in coreboot, which can be either a good thing or a bad thing.
- newusertoday 9y agobecause uefi gives more than booting support, it also acts as firmware interface even after kernel has booted up. Kernel can continue to use uefi services for hw specific things which are abstracted via uefi interface
- djsumdog 9y agoI wish Google would mandate that with newer Android versions instead of this /vendor crap in Oreo. Microsoft mandated UEFI for their phones, but unfortunately their bootloaders are still locked. If they weren't though, it'd be a great standardized platform for alt OSes.
- newusertoday 9y agonewer android versions of qualcomm are coming with uefi