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Uefi is pretty pointless when your device doesn't even run a full-blown operating system. In the embedded world your software knows exactly what hardware it is
by crote 3y ago
Uefi is pretty pointless when your device doesn't even run a full-blown operating system. In the embedded world your software knows exactly what hardware it is going to run on, so uefi is just a waste of time.
You only need something like uefi when you start using mostly hardware-independent software, like trying to run Linux on it. A lot of the chips these companies make are not even remotely close to that.
- treyd 3y agoMany of these devices will run Linux though, and it's becomming increasingly more common as even the low end chips are pretty capable nowadays. It could be worthwhile to build some lightweight alternative to UEFI that just handles disk identification and handing off a devtree to whatever bootloader comes after it instead of implementing the behemoth of a spec that is all of UEFI. Call it "LWFI", "light-weight firmware interface"?
- monocasa 3y agoThat just sounds like uboot.
- CameronNemo 3y agoUboot does efi. It can also just exec Linux directly. But more interesting is whether the ram training code and ring -1 layers are open source.
- crote 3y agoNot really, no. Linux isn't going to run on a chip with 48k of memory which doesn't even have an MMU, and doing disk identification is pretty pointless when your "disk" is 256k on on-chip flash - or a hardsoldered 2M SPI chip if you are really lucky.