I wanted to use UEFI, but my orangepi cm5 modules don't seem to have the SPI chip needed to store the UEFI there, so I'd have to load it on a partition and lose out on some features like persisting variables across boot.
The arm ecosystem really needs to settle on some sort of universal boot loader / firmware layer and stop just hacking up the linux kernel and not contributing back to it.
https://developer.arm.com/documentation/107981/0302/SystemRe...
Good, you understand the situation perfectly.
> And (assuming you're correct), how does Armbian deal with that / get around it?
You'll notice that if you try to download it from https://www.armbian.com/download/ , nearly every board has a different download image; this is because every one of those images embeds its own boot chain. There are efforts (in some projects, I'm not aware of armbian doing this) to build some amount of early bootloader per-board (often uboot), and just make the install steps something like "install this per-board thing, then install the real OS using a standard image" but that's less common and doesn't work super well when that initial bootloader has to go on the same storage device as the main OS.
proxysna•1y ago
Edit: Also if you don't like/want Ubuntu/Debian their build documentation is pretty great.
dima55•1y ago
qwertox•1y ago
dima55•1y ago
qwertox•1y ago
RetroTechie•1y ago
Why? That sounds dumb. And (assuming you're correct), how does Armbian deal with that / get around it?
ajb•1y ago
The sad part is that on ARM the kernel is usually also custom compiled for the board. So what happens is that Armbian ship a different image for each board.
If you go and look in https://github.com/torvalds/linux/tree/master/arch/arm you see a zillion "mach-xxx" directories for different SoC architectures, even if they all use Arm.
Device-tree is a partial solution, but no-one seems to have an incentive to finish the job and let a single image run on any (sufficiently recent) arm board. It's difficult for the community to fix because most people have only their own board. Someone would need to pay for a CI rig with every board, and some kernel devs to do the work of building a single kernel to run across everything. (I think that's originally what Linaro was for - not sure why they didn't finish the job)
qwertox•1y ago
FlyingSnake•1y ago
FWIW: I’m running dietPi on my OG Pi Zero W and it doesn’t even hit 30% resource usage.
apple4ever•1y ago