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> U-Boot is very easy to build and patch and hack on, and it's well known in these streets. U-boot is very simple and very good at booting device-specific OS i
by josteink 5y ago
> U-Boot is very easy to build and patch and hack on, and it's well known in these streets.
U-boot is very simple and very good at booting device-specific OS images.
What it fail at is providing abstractions and interfaces to provide to device-agnostic images so that they can boot without being tailored to a specific piece of hardware.
Which is why most Rpis are running Raspbian, not Debian.
For better or worse UEFI solves this and allows you to boot a plain Debian ARM64 ISO on any ARM64 machine with UEFI-compliant firmware.
Just like you (of course!) can on a regular PC. That’s where we need to get with ARM too. Make them work just like regular PCs.
Aarch64 has this solved in user-space. Now we need to get booting fixed too.
- garaetjjte 5y agoU-Boot can provide basic UEFI environment. Hardware description is another thing, either ACPI or DeviceTree can be used.
- aseipp 5y agoAttached device enumeration and boot firmware are somewhat orthogonal concerns; though certain ARM standards for various boot certifications ("ServerReady") do, in fact, require ACPI. But for mobile phones there's no need for it. You can just use a device-tree for the system and be done with it. (And yes, there are a lot of device tree files needed for all the devices, and while "self describing" would be nice it's ultimately a lot easier to just "have a lot of small files")