Technology

37355 readers

186 users here now

Rumors, happenings, and innovations in the technology sphere. If it's technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

ARM64 for the masses (lemmy.goblackcat.com)

submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

21 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Hey! Does anybody have any information about if and when a company might offer ARM64 for general desktop use? I would like to build my own in the same way that I might build a desktop PC out of an Intel or AMD processor.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago

ARM UEFI exists, it's just not very common like it is on PCs. Technically, every x86/x86_64 PC has its own custom bootloader that describes the peculiarities of the given hardware/motherboard, it's just that the standard has been that every x86 machine ever made (barring a few Android Atom tablets) comes with a BIOS/UEFI bootloader built in that standardizes the boot process.

On ARM, it is possible to UEFI boot (and some ARM bootloaders provide varying degrees of UEFI boot support - Tow Boot on the PinePhones uses UEFI for instance, there is one available for RPi 4 as well). However, since ARM devices are mostly phones and tablets running Android or single board computers (often provided with no software at all) they usually don't come with a UEFI compatible bootloader. Hopefully this will change, or at very least second-stage UEFI capable bootloaders become more widely available to add UEFI capabilities to devices with Android bootloaders. U-Boot does have some UEFI capabilities and is commonly used for single board computers that don't have a built in bootloader.