Yeah I would love not being dependent on x86 and its horrid UEFI mess. Then again... I believe technically ARM (and even RISC-V) board manufacturers can also make something similar. Let's hope that doesn't become a thing though.
The application profiles (like RVA22) have a bunch of requirements on hardware that must be present, the boot process and interface the firmware offers to the OS (i.e. opensbi).
I just checked the Ubuntu RISC-V download page and it has 2 different ISOs for 2 boards from the same vendor! And apparently those are the only 2 boards with ISOs available 0_o
Yes, you will be able to, at some point.
>I just checked the Ubuntu RISC-V download page and it has 2 different ISOs for 2 boards from the same vendor!
No board out there is RVA22 compliant, as RVA22 itself isn't done and closed. It is expected to be this spring.
By the time large scale production of boards happen and they ship to the masses, this will be a solved problem.
I do not expect this to happen this year. Maybe the next it'll start to pick up.
Meanwhile in ARM/RISC-V embedded land, every chip and every board is its own special snowflake. With no ACPI/UEFI, someone’s gotta hardcode the config of every device on every board, including the ones inside the SoC. Naturally the communities around these boards are even more fragmented than Linux distros already are.