• Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
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    3 months ago

    With ARM chips, you can’t assume they use UEFI. Semi-hardcoded bootloader paths are par for the course on many ARM SoCs, especially by Qualcom.

    I believe Microsoft prefers UEFI so perhaps they’ve implemented it to please them, but on a Linux model I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a hardcoded vendor signing key in there with a uBoot fork that’ll load a kernel from a magical offset instead of presenting a management UI or options.

    Booting on ARM is a real pain (even with UEFI because not all devices allow user specified keys to be loaded or secure boot to be turned off).

    • Killing_Spark@feddit.de
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      3 months ago

      I never understood why booting arm is such a pain. I mean I get that the current situation is that it is a pain but I don’t get why this is the situation.

      • qaz@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        Mobile devices usually run iOS or Android which have their own dedicated boot loader. Embedded devices usually just boot directly into the main storage.

        • Killing_Spark@feddit.de
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          3 months ago

          Especially with android I don’t get it. Every vendor has to maintain their own boot loader and modify the aosp code just to get it to boot on their devices. Is it just to avoid people slapping their own os on their phones?

      • Balder@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        I think UEFI was something that took a while to be standardized and mostly because of Intel’s influence over it, while ARM seems more diverse both in manufacturers and types of devices. When things are decentralized it becomes much more difficult to get everyone on board of something.

        • Killing_Spark@feddit.de
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          3 months ago

          I guess but bios was a thing way before uefi and while it apparently also was a pain because people implemented it differently it did work.

          Afaik the mein problem with arm is the discoverability of the hardware on the bus. For x86 it’s pretty dynamic but arm needs something called a device tree.