UEFI for Pine64

[xalius]

no, those aren't old boards, they are current. this is not allwinner SoC's boards, and their uboot doesn't support much. features are just not implemented.

For the sake of clarity, do these boards have names? If they are very new, then their situation may be very similar to Pine64 and the work adding support for the missing features might be already under way.

uboot on the other hand is a not structured, not documented mess. in order to get how to work for it, one needs learn through its entire codebase, it would not be easier and not that fun at all.

U-boot does have a bit of documentation and it is easy/usable enough. I have already provided two links to you in this discussion thread. I'm pretty sure that you can find most of the needed information yourself if you put some effort into it.

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UEFI may make some sense for these tiny boards from an educational standpoint and from a security standpoint, as long as major corporations don't control it.

Yes, modern ARM systems rely on the firmware remaining active all the time and providing some services for the operating system running under it. At the very minimum the firmware is providing the PSCI interface, which is used for bringing up secondary CPU cores and implementing SMP. In the case of older 32-bit Allwinner chips, the U-Boot bootloader is responsible for starting this firmware and it is fully open source. In the case of Allwinner A64, the firmware is maintained not as a part of U-Boot, but as a separate ATF project. Things are a little bit more complicated by the fact that Allwinner SoCs also have a supplementary OpenRISC core,  which can provide some assistance for implementing a decent suspend-to-ram support and power management handling in general. This part of code is closed source in the Allwinner's BSP, but it is more or less optional and the mainline U-Boot & Linux kernel can run without it. Moreover, we can compile and run arbitrary code on the OpenRISC core too, but just have not implemented a usable firmware for it yet. As mentioned earlier, UEFI is a useful standard, it already has basic support in U-Boot and things will improve even more in the future.

Alternative firmware & bootloader implementations are surely welcome. But from the purely practical point of view, they need to bring something useful to the table in order to successfully compete with the existing solutions. Especially considering that the existing solutions are not standing still either.

The corporations can't have control even if they wanted to because Allwinner SoCs are perfectly open source friendly and don't require any signed blobs. The first stage bootloder code starts with full privileges and is not restricted by the boot ROM in any way. You don't normally have this kind of complete unrestricted freedom with the SoCs from Samsung or other big corporations. It is in fact one of the reasons why Allwinner is so popular and has an active open source community around it.

Thanks again for this information, I learned a lot about how those SoC boot and operate from the efforts of linux-sunxi development community, keep up the good work