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Re:Pre-Prod HoneyComb LX2K 16-Core Mini ITX Arm Workstation ... by snazz on Saturday July 06, 2019 @06:01PM (#20372280)
I'm also wondering how the BIOS/UEFI equivalent on these machines works--I really hate how the Raspberry Pi does it (boot partition on SD card contains all data).
Re:Pre-Prod HoneyComb LX2K 16-Core Mini ITX Arm Workstation ... by p_l on Saturday July 06, 2019 @07:41PM (#20372708)
Apparently they are going for SBSA, which means it will have proper UEFI implementation, including possibly ACPI, so you will have normal UEFI experience.
Re:Pre-Prod HoneyComb LX2K 16-Core Mini ITX Arm Workstation ... by drewg123 on Saturday July 06, 2019 @07:00PM (#20372551)
At work we just got an aarch64 box from a vendor that has a very x86-like UEFI setup. Right down to the "BIOS" setup screens. It was very familiar seeming, but I'd rather have something like coreboot.
Re:Pre-Prod HoneyComb LX2K 16-Core Mini ITX Arm Workstation ... by p_l on Saturday July 06, 2019 @07:42PM (#20372717)
Coreboot only handles low-level initialization, it will still need a higher level payload unless you're going to hardcode your kernel to the board for every update.

Now, coreboot+tianocore uefi for somewhat open firmware...

Re:Pre-Prod HoneyComb LX2K 16-Core Mini ITX Arm Workstation ... by yjftsjthsd-h on Saturday July 06, 2019 @06:17PM (#20372356)
This board appears to have some flash onboard, so it's at least better than booting from SD card.
Re:Pre-Prod HoneyComb LX2K 16-Core Mini ITX Arm Workstation ... by linux4kix on Sunday July 07, 2019 @04:39AM (#20374159)
The COM Express 7 module, has SPI-NOR for booting, a second SPI for UEFI secure variable storage, and eMMC for an embedded or recovery OS. Other than that you can boot your distro from eMMC, USB, Sata, or NVME.
Re:Pre-Prod HoneyComb LX2K 16-Core Mini ITX Arm Workstation ... by monocasa on Saturday July 06, 2019 @06:57PM (#20372534)
The Minoca guys wrote a UEFI loader for RPi FWIW.
Re:Pre-Prod HoneyComb LX2K 16-Core Mini ITX Arm Workstation ... by mikedelfino on Saturday July 06, 2019 @06:25PM (#20372400)
Could you please elaborate on how Raspberry Pi's approach is an issue?
Re:Pre-Prod HoneyComb LX2K 16-Core Mini ITX Arm Workstation ... by zamadatix on Saturday July 06, 2019 @06:46PM (#20372497)
Between the official boot firmware not being UEFI compatible and not being onboard it means you have to create a custom installation image and apply it to the disk rather than grabbing a generic installer and going. Also you need to do this for each bootable media you wish to create rather than once (and update each).
Re:Pre-Prod HoneyComb LX2K 16-Core Mini ITX Arm Workstation ... by monocasa on Saturday July 06, 2019 @09:51PM (#20373142)
Philosophically, I actually like the RPi approach (ie. a simple image with device tree) a lot more than ACPI/UEFI. ACPI involves a whole super privileged virtual machine with byte code from god knows where, whereas device tree gives more or less complete control over to the kernel image (sure PSCI is a thing, but that's a lot more defined WRT boundaries to me than ACPI).

Basically an ACPI system is a lot easier to bootstrap because you don't need to support all of the little subcomponents of the board explicitly, but once you supprt devoce tree, you support the board in a much more complete and meaningful way, and it's truly your kernel running the show.