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.

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