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mschuster91today at 2:17 AM1 replyview on HN

> There are standards for ARM, and they are called UEFI, ACPI, and SMBIOS.

The most popular ARM dev and production board - the Raspberry Pi - doesn't speak a single one of these on its own, so do many of the various clones/alternatives, and many phones don't either, it's LK/aboot, Samsung and MTK have their proprietary bootloaders, and at least in the early days I've come across u-boot as well (edit: MTK's second-stage seems to be an u-boot fork). And Apple of course has been doing their own stuff with iBoot ever since the iPhone/iPod Touch that is now used across the board (replacing EFI which was used in the Intel era), and obviously there was a custom bootloader on the legacy iPods but my days hacking these are long since gone.

I haven't had the misfortune of having to deal with ARM Windows machines, maybe the situation looks better there but that's Qualcomm crap and I'm not touching that.


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pzmarzlytoday at 8:22 AM

TIL Raspberry Pi doesn't support UEFI - I once read RPi 4 and 5 do, but apparently that was just a community project. https://www.cnx-software.com/2020/02/18/raspberry-pi-4-uefia...

Regarding phones, Google is trying to push UEFI adoption with their EFI bootloader, but that's still some time away. Recent talk: https://lpc.events/event/19/contributions/2257/

Regarding Windows/PC ARM devices, I think the best experience would be on System76 Thelio (with Ampere CPU), but that's quite a pricy machine.

I don't really care what Apple does on this regard, they were always doing things differently. IIRC, even Macs that supported EFI, only supported EFI 1.1, not 2.0, no?

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