On Fri, Feb 19, 2021 at 3:48 PM Pete Batard <p...@akeo.ie> wrote:
> On 2021.02.19 13:37, Diederik de Haas wrote:
>
> The established goal of SBBR, which is a bona fide ARM standard that was
> designed precisely to address this major pain point, is to stop this
> madness and let the platform developers (rather than the distro
> maintainers) take care sorting out platform support by:
>
> 1. Making sure that the platform has a well established means of
> booting, through a formal UEFI firmware, which, despite its misgivings,
> is arguably the most user-friendly way to do so, as it mimics the known
> PC user experience.
It's easy to mix up these things, but the that does this is the 'BBR', which
comes in two flavors: 'SBBR' for large-scale servers and 'EBBR' for
the typical development board like the Raspberry Pi.
SBBR is usually not what you want here, having a simple boot-loader
like u-boot that implements enough of UEFI to be called EBBR is.
Ideally the bootloader in the Raspberry Pi would implement EBBR
directly, but at the moment, it does not.
The main purpose of the Tianocore port to the Raspberry Pi (as I
understand it) is to give developers a chance to hack on Tianocore
without having to buy or risk breaking an expensive server.
Having Tianocore onto an SD card to get booted instead of a kernel
is not really all that different to having a Debian netinstall kernel/initrd
on the SD card.
> 2. Working with mainline kernel to add whatever ACPI drivers are needed
> to support their platform, which too is arguably better than requiring
> everyone to use your "custom" version of the kernel.
The only thing that is needed for platform support is to have
the actual device drivers upstream, ACPI has nothing to do with
it. The reason that servers tend to just work is that they follow SBSA,
which defines a minimum set of hardware that just works, but that
doesn't help you on non-server hardware.
We certainly don't want to add ACPI support for all those non-server
platforms to the kernel, in addition to the support that we already
have.
Arnd
