Someone wrote in [personal profile] mjg59 2023-11-20 10:25 am (UTC)

ARM with ACPI and x86 without?

Thanks for the great artcile.

It's was really an eye opener why many ARM devices are so painful when installing an custom OS.

So I did some further searching...

 

There's actually some rare ARM hardware with UEFI support. And I guess it also has ACPI.

https://www.gigabyte.com/de/Enterprise/Rack-Server/R183-P92-rev-AAE1

https://www.linaro.org/blog/when-will-uefi-and-acpi-be-ready-on-arm/

 

For the Raspberry Pi there also seems to be a limited possibility to use UEFI and probably ACPI too. The trick is using a custom second stage bootloader. But that's custom stuff for the Raspi and will never be available for a broat range of ARM boards without UEFI+ACPI support by the hardware vendor.

https://github.com/pftf/RPi4

https://www.xda-developers.com/efidroid-is-a-second-stage-bootloader/

 

Unfortunately there's also opposite movement. As far as I understand, many Google x86 Chromebooks (Intel or AMD CPU, running Chrome OS) have a custom boot system and don't support UEFI boot.
(there's Coreboot underlying, but Google configured it in a way which does not enable UEFI boot)
So maybe at some point Google decides to also remove ACPI.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Chrome_OS_devices

https://doodlezucc.github.io/eupnea-linux.github.io/
(yes, you need something like LineageOS for Notebook to run a custom on Chromebooks)

 

Lets see what comes if the following starts off. I really hope NVidia and AMD use standardtized stuff like UEFI- and ACPI for their ARM chips. I don't want Notebooks to need custom ROMs like smartphones... https://www.reuters.com/technology/nvidia-make-arm-based-pc-chips-major-new-challenge-intel-2023-10-23/

German: https://www.heise.de/news/AMD-und-Nvidia-entwickeln-angeblich-ARM-Prozessoren-fuer-Notebooks-9342371.html


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