With Intel/AMD x86_64 chips, you have a platform to go with it: the PC architecture. The BIOS/UEFI in this architecture is incredibly standard over the course o

With Intel/AMD x86_64 chips, you have a platform to go with it: the PC architecture. The BIOS/UEFI in this architecture is incredibly standard over the course of their offerings. The PlayStation 4 has an x86 chip, but is not a PC. It cannot boot a mainline kernel because a lot of basic assumptions about how a PC works don't exist on the PS4 platform. The Fail0ver people have done some great talks at all the issues porting Linux to the PS4. The trouble with ARM is that it's not an architecture. Linux got so popular among developers and nerds in the 90s because you could just install it on any PC that was out there. When people got hardware working, they could upstream their changes. Phone manufactures patch the hell out of their kernels in terrible ways that can never be up-streamed, and include tons of binary blobs and shims. PostmarketOS is making some progress here, but it's slow. ARM phones don't have a standard BIOS. (with the exception of the Windows Mobile line, which has ARM+UEFI, yet Microsoft still won't release a bootloader unlock even though their phone is pretty much dead at this point). Some ARM devices use the devicetree standard for hardware identification/allocation, but it's still a mess. I wrote about this before: https://penguindreams.org/blog/android-fragmentation/ https://penguindreams.org/blog/android-fragmentation/