Comment by mschuster91
11 days ago
> 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.
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?
> 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?
Yup, but as long as you got an original Apple GPU that's enough to just stick a Windows or Linux USB stick and you can install straight from the stick. "Normal" PCI GPUs have to be reflashed with a GOP blob [1] so that Apple's EFI implementation can work with it.
Personally, I just went and installed OpenCore once and that's it.
[1] https://github.com/acidanthera/OpenCorePkg/tree/master/Stagi...