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A comment on Red Hat Introduces Arm Server Support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Parent comment

Re:Red Hat Introduces Arm Server Support for Red Hat Enterpr... by pm215 on Tuesday November 14, 2017 @12:03PM (#15696859)
The approach here for 64-bit ARM on servers has been to say "it must run UEFI". Then the vendor-specifics get dealt with by UEFI and ACPI, and the kernel can simply assume those facilities exist (and the distro can install new kernels in the usual UEFI way without having to know how to flash them into 500 different bootloaders). You can argue the merits and demerits of UEFI (and people do!) but there's a lot of benefit in pushing for "all server hardware must work like this".
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Re:Red Hat Introduces Arm Server Support for Red Hat Enterpr... by djsumdog on Tuesday November 14, 2017 @11:47PM (#15701517)
I wish Google would mandate that with newer Android versions instead of this /vendor crap in Oreo. Microsoft mandated UEFI for their phones, but unfortunately their bootloaders are still locked. If they weren't though, it'd be a great standardized platform for alt OSes.
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Re:Red Hat Introduces Arm Server Support for Red Hat Enterpr... by newusertoday on Wednesday November 15, 2017 @01:14AM (#15701791)
newer android versions of qualcomm are coming with uefi
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Re:Red Hat Introduces Arm Server Support for Red Hat Enterpr... by mtgx on Tuesday November 14, 2017 @12:18PM (#15697027)
Why not Coreboot?
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Re:Red Hat Introduces Arm Server Support for Red Hat Enterpr... by monocasa on Tuesday November 14, 2017 @03:01PM (#15698600)
There isn't much abstraction of the underlying hardware in coreboot, which can be either a good thing or a bad thing.
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Re:Red Hat Introduces Arm Server Support for Red Hat Enterpr... by tscs37 on Tuesday November 14, 2017 @12:52PM (#15697400)
Why core boot? Uefi is open source (edk, tiano) if you make it so.

Coreboot is also very x86 centric last I checked.

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Re:Red Hat Introduces Arm Server Support for Red Hat Enterpr... by subway on Tuesday November 14, 2017 @02:41PM (#15698418)
Coreboot has some pretty solid ARM support too. Modern Chromebooks (both x86 and ARM) use Coreboot with a "depthcharge" payload. You can even use Libreboot at this point to bring up an RK3288, and boot into ChromeOS or a traditional linux. Even cooler is that if you do your own build of Coreboot, you can provide your own OS verification keys, and use vbutil to sign your own OS and have custom verified boot.
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Re:Red Hat Introduces Arm Server Support for Red Hat Enterpr... by phkahler on Tuesday November 14, 2017 @06:09PM (#15700134)
>> Coreboot is also very x86 centric last I checked.

Actually RISC-V is fully supported:

https://riscv.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Tues1345-riscvc...

Real hardware coming soon...

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Re:Red Hat Introduces Arm Server Support for Red Hat Enterpr... by mtgx on Tuesday November 14, 2017 @02:37PM (#15698388)
Isn't UEFI way more complex? But I'm not sure if that's a problem because of Windows and all the drivers it has to support, or if it's a problem with the specification. I believe it was the latter? I think Google mentioned that in its recent talk on removing Intel ME.
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Re:Red Hat Introduces Arm Server Support for Red Hat Enterpr... by tscs37 on Tuesday November 14, 2017 @02:43PM (#15698439)
UEFI is more complex but also nicer for management.

Developing a runtime on UEFI is easy to setup and get going, you don't have that feature in coreboot.

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Re:Red Hat Introduces Arm Server Support for Red Hat Enterpr... by newusertoday on Wednesday November 15, 2017 @01:17AM (#15701796)
because uefi gives more than booting support, it also acts as firmware interface even after kernel has booted up. Kernel can continue to use uefi services for hw specific things which are abstracted via uefi interface
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