[chris37879]

I just stumbled across armbian recently and I must say I really like it.

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.

[Nexxxeh]

I'm not an Arm dev and am just a consumer so I may be misunderstanding, but isn't Arm SystemReady pretty much the thing that's intended to solve the problem you're talking about (among others)?

https://developer.arm.com/documentation/107981/0302/SystemRe...

[robotnikman]

It is, but it seems like only servers are adopting it at the moment. Or high end ARM workstations. I can't think of any consumer devices or SBC's off the top of my head that support it.