Rock64 Review

[MarkHaysHarris777]

I got it, from your other post it's seen that you think both uboot and UEFI are a part of ATF (BL3). No that's not exactly true. this is the situation where they have been unnecessarily made as those. but it is overcomplicated and bloated. ATF is just an ARM implementation of their own standard. Neither uboout nor UEFI are a part of it. It results in an unndeed duplication and clumsiness, because ARM obviously pushes their standard considering anything else a subordinate and none of importance, not paying attention to what has been already done. For example UEFI (I don't know much about the uboot structure, anything I saw there, shows rather lack of any), has its own model, which could incorporate this ARM architecture feature of splitting into Secure/Non-secure worlds. So arm might say to fw writers (or to themsleves), make an UEFI (based on the PI specification or not) implementation with Secure/Non-secure split in mind. But, ARM obviously didn't pay any attention to this, so in their freshly invented "wheel", UEFI ended up being just a late sub-stage in their lengthy overdesigned chain. despite UEFI is a full blown standard for making firmware that doesn't need any bloated arch specific gimp sticks as ATF. in theory, you can use your own secure world part of the FW. if you cannot gain access to the Secure part, then you are forced to rely on ATF, since every SoC vendor won't bother themselves with anything other than just grabbing ATF. well. still it's duplication, because it's several incompatible standards joint together on the "make it to just work" basis, no wonder why thoughts to put 16MB NOR chips arise with SBC makers.

Not everything is a PI and ARM are part of a much larger scale of things. I think we might be talking of distributed architecture that doesn't even resemble much of what we have today.
I am not all that bothered as the Rock64 has a 16MB nor that can be partitioned and be flexible to have the situation we have.
Yeah we are going to get UEFI and if that is via ATF or not I am not bothered as its a headache to read but have a feeling its much more than what seems to be your comprehension.
 I am not that sure maybe you are right but yeah UEFI is on the way.

uefi  might be on its way;

... but I would not hold my breath...   can't even get uboot to reliably boot from SPI yet;  and there are some other issues.  But what is on the way at least in terms of Rock64 is a boot loader on nor SPI flash so that the hardware specific stuff is modularized and kept separate from the software stuff;  looking forward to that.