Comment on Why don't cell phones have BIOS?
Static_Rocket@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Because ARM was built to be cheap.
BIOS nowadays is basically a bootloader shim in EEPROM. The majority of the ARM ecosystem wanted flexible and cheap devices. This promoted the use of a small ROM loader burned into the device and a removal of basically all EEPROM from the SoC.
The flexibility came back through the use of a secondary bootloader layer normally stored in the devices primary storage. Most manufacturers use u-boot or coreboot on an SD card or eMMC. Android standardized this as part of their partitioning scheme. All devices have a dedicated bootloader partition housing the secondary bootloader and any additional boot artifacts.
Then phones became wildly expensive and invalidated most of this.