An AArch64 desktop could be built in the same way that the Raspberry Pi was built, just with a higher spec CPU and more connectors.
If this model works for you, then yeah, a Raspberry Pi or a similar board could work. I've been hearing pretty great things about the new Pinebook Pro laptop.
I suppose in the AMD/Intel world, all these binary blobs are built into UEFI.
But: Is the bootloader even unlockable to install alternative software?
IIRC, MS require the device to support Secure Boot, but whether or not you can disable it or whether you can add other signing keys is undefined (and I have no idea what vendors do). (Originally the requirement was it must be always enabled and only the OEM could add keys, but that has since changed.)
SBC market is completely different thing. But that blog post was not about them.
For the most part, this doesn't matter. Most SoCs have all the features you want. Though, the article is specifically bemoaning lots of missing I/O. I think most vendors think that the USB connectivity is a big wildcard. But, I agree - NVMe would be nicer than mmc/SD, that's for sure.
> every ARM vendor starts their system using a proprietary, inscrutable Rube Goldberg machine.
This does matter, a lot. It matters so much that we didn't change how x86 booted for ~3 decades after the AT. ARM is trying to change things for their server products, at least [1]. I'm curious just how complicated/expensive the minimal product that satisfied this platform is. Could you still do it with SoCs in the same tier as the Raspi/ODROID/etc? Server-in-name-only?
[1] https://developer.arm.com/architectures/platform-design/serv...
The UEFI environment is a mashup of modules from the CPU/chipset manufacturer, a BIOS vendor like AMI, and sometimes stuff from TianoCore/EDK. The end result is specific to each board model, but most of the modules going into the UEFI implementation are either universal/hardware-agnostic, or uniquely determined by the choice of components on the motherboard (primarily the chipset and superIO). The only stuff here that's excessively messy and error-prone is the ACPI tables.
The configuration UI is particular to the board vendor. The UI necessarily has some tweaks for each particular model, but vendors share most of the code and visual design across the entire product line. Occasionally, it's possible to skip the silly UI and fall back to the default old-fashioned text mode standard configuration UI provided by AMI or whoever.
- 4 or 8 Cortex-A57 cores at 1.7 or 2Ghz
- support for up to 128 gig of either DDR3 or DDR4 memory
- 14 SATA 3 ports
- 2 10GbE ethernet ports
- 8x PCI-E 3.0
(EDIT: Fixed formatting, sorry!)
What does this mean? Where can I read more about this?
Here's a good overview:
https://thekandyancode.wordpress.com/2013/09/21/how-the-rasp...
Arm has a lot more variation than general purpose computing in the processor / SOC / SOM implementation, that is indeed the main appeal on the small end of the scale