Note: I'm winging this. I'd welcome contributions and comments from other. Nice news I heard at BSDCan (thanks Chris!): UEFI + ACPI for Raspberry Pi 4 <https://rpi4-uefi.dev/> Why is this important? The ARM ecosystem needs a universal environment to make OS distros universal. Almost every ARM system ("platform") is different, and this means that every Linux distro that supports it must be customized for that platform. (Contrast that with Linux Distros for the PC.) This works for the Raspberry Pi since that Platform is common enough. It works for Android (a Linux distro) because each SoC maker does the first half of the work and each phone maker finishes the job. That's just the cost of entry to the game. This is also why Android Phones lose software support so quickly: the SoC maker has no interest in long life, and neither do most phone makers. What is the solution? - the SoC maker has to want to do this (only they have specs for the device) (perhaps forced by Google?) - we need a consensus of the ABI for what ABI all firmware will provide OSes. Examples from previous platforms: - "BIOS" in CP/M (late 1970s) - "BIOS" in IBM PC - eventually: UEFI, APM, ACPI in successors to PC In ARM: - uboot [not really standardized] - "Device Tree" [not really standardized] - UEFI + ACPI [fat!] Unfortunately, consensus forming is messy and doesn't always happen.