Not for regular purposes of booting Raspbian, or just a standard Linux kernel(+initramfs). In fact, even u-boot is not needed to boot Linux, because the RPi fir

Not for regular purposes of booting Raspbian, or just a standard Linux kernel(+initramfs). In fact, even u-boot is not needed to boot Linux, because the RPi firmware is designed to boot Linux. FreeBSD uses u-boot because otherwise it'd have to implement Linux's conventions for booting, and it's just simpler to chainload via u-boot since u-boot already implements that.