[raggi]

There is a UEFI standard in some of Arms specs, but it’s only mandatory for the server class IP atm. Some soc vendors are starting to adopt it even in non-server class but it’s slow. My feedback to an Arm devrel a few years ago was exactly this though: you need to provide a consistent standard boot path that also helps OS authors with enough bootstrap that debugging is less of a crapshoot every single time. I hope some progress is made on pushing that down the stack.

When the topic comes up some people express a lot of hatred for uefi (mostly users rather than implementors) but where it’s implementors the ms style APIs and so on are largely the center of it IME, and that’s not really an easy fix when it’s already spec’d. Sometimes there are concerns about size, but slimmed down deployments are common in the socs that ship already - perhaps standardizing on what that slimmed down thing is might help too. May also assuage some of the other concerns of excessive runtime services (which seems rare, but I get the existential concern)

[phendrenad2]

I don't understand the hatred for UEFI. It seems like people get irrationally disgusted when they find out that it's a big complex standard with lots of extraneous stuff that almost nobody cares about (on desktop, that is). Just give me text, a framebuffer, file system access, and a memory map. It's not difficult. Sadly I think that no one will be happy until there is some equally-overwrought spec on the ARM side.

[p_l]

People have rose-tinted glasses for BIOS, have no idea of all sorts of hidden complexity that was involved in it, assumptions, etc. Or all the broken ideas that vendors put into BIOS-era firmware [0].

People also rarely think of the complexity inherent in having an open platform where owner of a device does not need to build/acquire a custom OS build for their machine, and thus see cases of "enough to run something they care about" and think that's enough.

[0] I still remember BIOS config menus and PCI card option roms that effectively had stripped down windows 3.0 in them, or an approximation of it. And how it meant presence of Intel PCI hardware RAID controller in certain server meant I needed a full crash cart or remote KVM to fix RAID config.

[LargoLasskhyfv]

Hrrm. File system. WTF do I need to have a VFATed EFI partiton somewhere, when I'm not using VFAT, or NTFS at all?