11–20 of 53 posts
The Rock 5 ITX+ is a nice board. I wish a 1U back panel were available for it. UEFI does make things a lot easier. It's a shame that this isn't more common for Arm boards, but it's good to see things heading in the right direction.
Serious question: what things does it make easier? Other than booting windows. I don't know anything about it except that it seems much more complicated than u-boot.
The Rock 5 ITX+ is a nice board. I wish a 1U back panel were available for it. UEFI does make things a lot easier. It's a shame that this isn't more common for Arm boards, but it's good to see things heading in the right direction.
Serious question: what things does it make easier? Other than booting windows. I don't know anything about it except that it seems much more complicated than u-boot.
Just look on Android phones - i.e. Lineage OS, special Android build for every phone. That would not be necessary if booting process would the same.
This here is the important next step for ARM SBCs. A working UEFI. Maybe they can get together and standardize something they can work on together. But this whole SD card flashing nonsense needs to stop.
For example, right now I have an old armhf i.MX6 Wandboard Quad that runs:
U-Boot -> UEFI (with Secure Boot if desired) -> Systemd Boot (or Linux EFI Boot Stub) -> Debian (or other distro)
Some arm devices such as the i.MX6, are strict on the placement of their boot firmware where it would interfere with a normal GPT table. One solution to this is to use a special "--move-main-table" option in gdisk² so that the GPT doesn't clobber U-Boot. While technically GPT is optional as long as U-Boot can read your main partition, I still always setup GPT anyway or Systemd Boot complains.
For completeness sake - uboot can also boot EFI binaries, though upstream won’t support GOP video on RK3588, and is also device tree only so no Windows, just Linux and BSDs. https://docs.u-boot.org/en/latest/develop/uefi/uefi.html
¹ https://u-boot.org/blog/seeing-is-believing-video-support-la...
The Rock 5 ITX+ is a nice board. I wish a 1U back panel were available for it. UEFI does make things a lot easier. It's a shame that this isn't more common for Arm boards, but it's good to see things heading in the right direction.
Serious question: what things does it make easier? Other than booting windows. I don't know anything about it except that it seems much more complicated than u-boot.
This here is the important next step for ARM SBCs. A working UEFI. Maybe they can get together and standardize something they can work on together. But this whole SD card flashing nonsense needs to stop.
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.
SBSA standard in the server realm seems to have it figured out.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Serious question: what things does it make easier? Other than booting windows. I don't know anything about it except that it seems much more complicated than u-boot.
Having UEFI in some form means you can just boot your preferred Linux installer and install to disk, much as you would for an x86 device, rather that needing to get a specific disk image and dd it to an SD card.
U-Boot does basic enough UEFI emulation for most use cases. I find that I don't need native UEFI firmware and I can just build U-Boot with UEFI support for most ARM devices. For example, right now I have an old armhf i.MX6 Wandboard Quad that runs: U-Boot -> UEFI (with Secure Boot if desired) -> Systemd Boot (or Linux EFI Boot Stub) -> Debian (or other distro) That same layout should be doable on any U-Boot¹ supporte…