Linux 5.10 To Have Initial Support For UEFI Booting On RISC-V

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Linux 5.10 To Have Initial Support For UEFI Booting On RISC-V

It looks like the upcoming Linux 5.10 kernel cycle will be the first to bring initial support for UEFI booting on RISC-V hardware...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-5.10-UEFI-RISC-V

[Developer12]

Why the f*ck do companies keep trying to port UEFI garbage to non-x86 platforms? Is this microsoft Stockholm syndrome?

[calc]

Why the f*ck do companies keep trying to port UEFI garbage to non-x86 platforms? Is this microsoft Stockholm syndrome?

Status quo on ARM gives you the answer. Nearly every ARM device's boot process is different so there is no way to create an unified installer for them. The potential alternative Open Firmware no one really knows anything about anymore, but there are plenty that know UEFI. There are a few ARM devices that use UEFI but they are unfortunately uncommon.

[rene]

it is not like anyone ever asked for a large, convoluted, and often proprietary EFI bios of all firmwares for a RISCV system, ever, ..? https://youtu.be/z_V1Tke-2sE

[rene]

Status quo on ARM gives you the answer. Nearly every ARM device's boot process is different so there is no way to create an unified installer for them. The potential alternative Open Firmware no one really knows anything about anymore, but there are plenty that know UEFI. There are a few ARM devices that use UEFI but they are unfortunately uncommon.

modern ARM boards with proper BSP boot loader can boot a shared uImage just fine.

[Ladis]

UEFI is a form of BIOS. Without BIOS you need to build an OS image for each hardware package (SoC + PCIe cards, if we're talking about desktop/server). That's the mess e.g. on Android phones. In servers, UEFI is the standard and works fine - you can plug e.g. an ethernet PCIe card into the server and don't care what CPU architecture it runs on (X86/ARM). The UEFI BIOS on the card intializes the card properly during the boot. Unlike X86, UEFI code is bytecode, so it's CPU architecture agnostic. And BTW the (U)EFI wasn't first on Windows, but Mac.

[calc]

modern ARM boards with proper BSP boot loader can boot a shared uImage just fine.

'BSP' is just an acronym for 'board support package', and will differ for every board/soc vendor. So what exactly is your definition of a 'proper BSP boot loader' in that case?