4 ms·

That's true as long as you don't mind using modified vendor supplied operating systems. Most of these advanced boards will lock you into some patched Ubuntu ver

That's true as long as you don't mind using modified vendor supplied operating systems. Most of these advanced boards will lock you into some patched Ubuntu version. So far from the ones I've worked only the Pi and a patched Rockpro64 allows you to boot some generic USB installer from UEFI and have the system your way with mainline kernel support.

bradfa 3y ago
I didn't see any mention of UEFI in my first read through about the Pi 5. Did I just miss it? I would like to have a quiet and reasonably performant ARM aarch64 box at this price point, but only if it supports UEFI without needing to resort to silly EFI system partition tricks (which the Pi 4 required, last I knew).
- geerlingguy 3y ago
  No official UEFI support at this time.
- fanf2 3y ago
  One of the differences in the Raspberry Pi 5 is the bootloader is in EEPROM. It has 2MiBytes which they doubt would be enough to fit a UEFI implementation. So it sounds to me like there isn’t much chance of UEFI this time.
  - bradfa 3y ago
    2MiB could be enough space for an EFI implementation, but some features definitely would need to be disabled and it would definitely depend on how big the code for interfacing to the specific hardware on the board actually is. 4MiB is often big enough to have a functional EFI implementation, so 2MiB doesn't sound crazy to me, but I haven't tried.
- aseipp 3y ago
  The RPi4 has had a functional port of TianoCore for a while now, which is likely what they were referring to. You can use e.g. generic aarch64 UEFI Fedora images out of the box with it. https://github.com/pftf/RPi4 https://github.com/pftf/RPi4
  - bradfa 3y ago
    RasPi 4 requires some special files in the EFI system partition and a special non-stock EEPROM, at least for the older RasPi 4 boards, maybe the newer stock come with the UEFI-enabled EEPROM image? Regardless, in my experience with other EFI-enabled boards, I've never had to put the actual EFI into the EFI system partition, the EFI itself lives in a SPI flash usually so that you can boot "from" EFI with no "disks" attached. Definitely the RasPi 4 having the ability to run UEFI, even in this way, is good. But what I'm looking for specifically is having UEFI just like every other UEFI-enabled PC and server does it, where I don't need a disk to boot to UEFI.
IE6 3y ago
I agree with you about dev boards but I think their post was focused on things like used NUCs or other small x86 machines that are only marginally larger than a Pi in an enclosure and include literally everything you'd want (enclosure, pwa fan, SATA SSD, NVMe, wifi, etc.) and the software support is there (linux / windows).
- nine_k 3y ago
  How about power consumption, especially in when not under load? I remember that Intel chips were not as efficient at it as chips with ARM cores.
  - IE6 3y ago
    Good point, I am not sure they can compete with the smaller arm development boards in that regard!
  - belthesar 3y ago
    Intel's finally getting competitive in this market with the 12th/13th gen chips, because of the heterogeneous efficiency/performance core layout. That said, I pine for an ARM SoC or SBC that has a larger core count, and doesn't have embedded RAM packages, or at least offers at least 32 GB of RAM.
BackBlast 3y ago
He's talking about off the shelf PCs, not Arm based SBCs with a wonky software stack.

bradfa 3y ago

I didn't see any mention of UEFI in my first read through about the Pi 5. Did I just miss it? I would like to have a quiet and reasonably performant ARM aarch64 box at this price point, but only if it supports UEFI without needing to resort to silly EFI system partition tricks (which the Pi 4 required, last I knew).

geerlingguy 3y ago
No official UEFI support at this time.
fanf2 3y ago
One of the differences in the Raspberry Pi 5 is the bootloader is in EEPROM. It has 2MiBytes which they doubt would be enough to fit a UEFI implementation. So it sounds to me like there isn’t much chance of UEFI this time.
- bradfa 3y ago
  2MiB could be enough space for an EFI implementation, but some features definitely would need to be disabled and it would definitely depend on how big the code for interfacing to the specific hardware on the board actually is. 4MiB is often big enough to have a functional EFI implementation, so 2MiB doesn't sound crazy to me, but I haven't tried.
aseipp 3y ago
The RPi4 has had a functional port of TianoCore for a while now, which is likely what they were referring to. You can use e.g. generic aarch64 UEFI Fedora images out of the box with it. https://github.com/pftf/RPi4 https://github.com/pftf/RPi4
- bradfa 3y ago
  RasPi 4 requires some special files in the EFI system partition and a special non-stock EEPROM, at least for the older RasPi 4 boards, maybe the newer stock come with the UEFI-enabled EEPROM image? Regardless, in my experience with other EFI-enabled boards, I've never had to put the actual EFI into the EFI system partition, the EFI itself lives in a SPI flash usually so that you can boot "from" EFI with no "disks" attached. Definitely the RasPi 4 having the ability to run UEFI, even in this way, is good. But what I'm looking for specifically is having UEFI just like every other UEFI-enabled PC and server does it, where I don't need a disk to boot to UEFI.

IE6 3y ago

I agree with you about dev boards but I think their post was focused on things like used NUCs or other small x86 machines that are only marginally larger than a Pi in an enclosure and include literally everything you'd want (enclosure, pwa fan, SATA SSD, NVMe, wifi, etc.) and the software support is there (linux / windows).

nine_k 3y ago
How about power consumption, especially in when not under load? I remember that Intel chips were not as efficient at it as chips with ARM cores.
- IE6 3y ago
  Good point, I am not sure they can compete with the smaller arm development boards in that regard!
- belthesar 3y ago
  Intel's finally getting competitive in this market with the 12th/13th gen chips, because of the heterogeneous efficiency/performance core layout. That said, I pine for an ARM SoC or SBC that has a larger core count, and doesn't have embedded RAM packages, or at least offers at least 32 GB of RAM.

BackBlast 3y ago

He's talking about off the shelf PCs, not Arm based SBCs with a wonky software stack.