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ARM SoCs have always been very proprietary and fragmented, and until/if something like the x86/PC comes along I don't think just UEFI is enough. The PC flourish

ARM SoCs have always been very proprietary and fragmented, and until/if something like the x86/PC comes along I don't think just UEFI is enough. The PC flourished because of many de-facto standards, and not just the BIOS. Unfortunately the companies these days seem to love their proprietariness, so I don't think something like that will happen again.

heavyset_go 1y ago
It's this. UEFI doesn't solve the problem of peripheral discovery, for example. SBSA standard in the server realm seems to have it figured out.
- phendrenad2 1y ago
  UEFI+ACPI+PCIE+XHCI pretty much covers everything you could want.
  - jeroenhd 1y ago
    In theory yes, in practice ACPI isn't always a great solution (as can be seen by the many lines of kernel logs about broken DSDTs on my motherboard). Manufacturers kind of suck at actually describing the hardware on their motherboards and hacks and workarounds are very much required to provide a usable experience on many machines. Unless manufacturers stop lazily copy-pasting their DSDTs with minor changes, we should probably hope for a better solution.
    - p_l 1y ago
      There is no a better solution because "manufacturer loads broken description table" does not care for the technology of the description table, just that manufacturer borked it. On PC, the main check against it is Microsoft because they at least try to make vendors care with "Designed for Windows" and the like and their test suites.
    - phendrenad2 1y ago
      Actually, I take that back. ACPI is fine except for the DSDT system, which should be nuked from orbit. These lazy PC hardware manufacturers keep pushing "please bro just let us run arbitrary code on your machine bro". This goes back to VGA BIOS (ugh). There's no need for it, other than the fact that it makes hardware vendor's lives slightly easier. Definitely something to avoid when designing a new interface.
- p_l 1y ago
  Arguably, "full" UEFI implementation mandates use of ACPI, which solves discovery of components that don't have self-discovery mechanism to use (including finding the very roots of various self-discovering buses)
pjmlp 1y ago
PC flourished, because IBM lost control, what is happening with ARM is basically what every other 8 and 16 bit home computers used to be.
- p_l 1y ago
  And part of the lost control was emulating IBM PC enough that software that ignored sanity and did weird things to hardware or assumed certain behaviours worked even on clones and most importantly, upgrades

heavyset_go 1y ago

It's this. UEFI doesn't solve the problem of peripheral discovery, for example. SBSA standard in the server realm seems to have it figured out.

phendrenad2 1y ago
UEFI+ACPI+PCIE+XHCI pretty much covers everything you could want.
- jeroenhd 1y ago
  In theory yes, in practice ACPI isn't always a great solution (as can be seen by the many lines of kernel logs about broken DSDTs on my motherboard). Manufacturers kind of suck at actually describing the hardware on their motherboards and hacks and workarounds are very much required to provide a usable experience on many machines. Unless manufacturers stop lazily copy-pasting their DSDTs with minor changes, we should probably hope for a better solution.
  - p_l 1y ago
    There is no a better solution because "manufacturer loads broken description table" does not care for the technology of the description table, just that manufacturer borked it. On PC, the main check against it is Microsoft because they at least try to make vendors care with "Designed for Windows" and the like and their test suites.
  - phendrenad2 1y ago
    Actually, I take that back. ACPI is fine except for the DSDT system, which should be nuked from orbit. These lazy PC hardware manufacturers keep pushing "please bro just let us run arbitrary code on your machine bro". This goes back to VGA BIOS (ugh). There's no need for it, other than the fact that it makes hardware vendor's lives slightly easier. Definitely something to avoid when designing a new interface.
p_l 1y ago
Arguably, "full" UEFI implementation mandates use of ACPI, which solves discovery of components that don't have self-discovery mechanism to use (including finding the very roots of various self-discovering buses)

pjmlp 1y ago

PC flourished, because IBM lost control, what is happening with ARM is basically what every other 8 and 16 bit home computers used to be.

p_l 1y ago
And part of the lost control was emulating IBM PC enough that software that ignored sanity and did weird things to hardware or assumed certain behaviours worked even on clones and most importantly, upgrades