[GTALUG] UEFI, it's an open standard

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Fri, Oct 16, 2015 at 12:44:02PM -0400, Scott Sullivan wrote:
> Do you mean 'ARM' the fab-less design company. ARM the 100+ licensees that design the SoCs. The 1000s of board design and manufactures. Or ARM the community of software devs and distributions.

I mean whatever part of the community seems to have decided UEFI and
ACPI was the way to go for 64bit arm servers.  After all openfirmware
has been around for years, is supported by linux, and already used by
powerpc, mips, and a few x86 systems (and probably others too).
Would have probably saved them a few years too by not having to first
get UEFI and ACPI into a state where they could be used as standards.

To some extent a lot of arm developers are also somewhat indirectly
already used to openfirmware too, since devicetree is in fact based on
openfirmware's way of telling the kernel about the system, which is why
all the function calls for devicetree in the kernel are of_* calls.
In fact using openfirmware would mean your drivers would work the same
whether you boot from openfirmware or with u-boot with a devicetree dtb.
No difference at all.  UEFI means you have to be different from the
embedded systems.  Of course on servers they may simply be assuming
everything is going to be PCIe based, and hence device detection is not
an issue to worry about.

So at least from my point of view, the arm server community probably
fucked up and wasted a lot of time.  But maybe there were reasons to
not stick with something that was already done.  Maybe they didn't like
IEEE standards. :)

The only thing I can see going for UEFI is that some people are getting
used to it on x86 (although a lot of people clearly are not used to it
at all yet).

> Because on thing Chris was trying to make clear is it is the last group that is organizing and leading the push to have the middle group adopt a common boot path.
> 
> ARM the company doesn't really care here because they've sold the designs and can focus on the next one.

Oh certainly.

-- 
Len Sorensen