Why doesn't ARM arch use UEFI?

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Why doesn't ARM arch use UEFI?

Postby thor314 » Sat Jul 18, 2020 8:05 am

Did a little searching, and the only thing I could find was this article from 6 years ago.
https://www.linaro.org/blog/when-will-u ... dy-on-arm/
I'm under the impression that ARM arch is using a couple things that seem a couple years behind, the UEFI thing and Bash not Zsh for instance. Is this because of insufficient maintainers or technical problems?

It occurs to me that I could wrong, and ARM does in fact use UEFI, and my accusations are baseless, in which case I should cite that I've looked at the most recent RPi4 and RPi2 disk images, as of yesterday, and ran `ls /sys/firmware`, and didn't see efi.
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Re: Why doesn't ARM arch use UEFI?

Postby psychokiller » Sat Jul 25, 2020 4:58 pm

UEFI is an INTEL patent and I see no use on ARM. Might be wrong though.

ACPI instead is something that can be useful but something similar is already available with UBoot.

If you instead mention UEFI for secure boot (booting signed boot images) it seems to be available in UBoot since 2013.07 as discussed here https://lwn.net/Articles/571031/

So the question seems a bit strange to me...
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Re: Why doesn't ARM arch use UEFI?

Postby summers » Sat Jul 25, 2020 8:28 pm

I suspect part of the issue is that the arm world is so varied. So in linux, arm went the way of the device tree, which specified all hardware, and that done it was down to the kernel to handle.

Things like gpt, that I think is because uboot became the arm boot loader of choice, it's what most devices use. Uboot has got many interfaces, but not sure if it handles gpt, or at least most compiled versions dont.

Guess the question is, why would you want uefi on an arm machine? Not clear to me what it gives you, as arm never really had a bios like x86.
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