> to make some standards so at least folks can boot something maybe
There's still no incentive to do this outside of server hardware (Red Hat doesn't support rebuilds of RHEL). Why bother making a firmware stack that allows anything to boot when you can just modify the Linux kernel to work on your non-standard hardware and work around any bugs, publish an Ubuntu image that you'll only update a few times and then call it a day. Then, maybe, just maybe, support for your SBC will be upstreamed a few years later, but long after it's actually useful.
Look how messed up and fragmented Android is still, even Windows Phone had a UEFI stack that in theory could allow all Windows phones of a certain architecture to have a shared image (although I don't believe this was fully achieved).
Imagine if Windows or Fedora for x64 had to be repacked for every single motherboard/CPU combination, it'd be insane, yet somehow it's fine for ARM, what a joke it's been allowed to become. I think electronic waste regulation is going to be needed to sort it out.
The Radxa Orion O6 we're talking about is not server hardware, but they did implement ServerReady UEFI firmware anyway, and it does allow anything to boot. In the article they booted unmodified, upstream Windows and Linux distro ISOs.
There's still no incentive to do this outside of server hardware (Red Hat doesn't support rebuilds of RHEL). Why bother making a firmware stack that allows anything to boot when you can just modify the Linux kernel to work on your non-standard hardware and work around any bugs, publish an Ubuntu image that you'll only update a few times and then call it a day. Then, maybe, just maybe, support for your SBC will be upstreamed a few years later, but long after it's actually useful.
Look how messed up and fragmented Android is still, even Windows Phone had a UEFI stack that in theory could allow all Windows phones of a certain architecture to have a shared image (although I don't believe this was fully achieved).
Imagine if Windows or Fedora for x64 had to be repacked for every single motherboard/CPU combination, it'd be insane, yet somehow it's fine for ARM, what a joke it's been allowed to become. I think electronic waste regulation is going to be needed to sort it out.