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Does this board boot Linux via a device tree, or have hardware discovery?

How about UEFI vs arm-specific bootloaders?

I tried arm32 Linux a few years back, and the largest hindrance at the time was the device trees and non-UEFI boot process. Given up on exploring the platform further (except maybe for SBC like raspberry pi) until that situation improves.

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The CIX CP8180 uses UEFI (it is intended to boot Windows which requires it) but the boot flow can, I believe, use either ACPI or device trees, based on a boot setting. The ACPI boot flow has the advantage that any normal Linux distro should work, while the device tree variant I think has more hardware enablement.

The upstream story due to this is kind of a mixed bag, though. I think they also still use out-of-tree NPU drivers, etc. Device trees and other updates are still flowing upstream. I think the next Mesa release will support the Immortalis GPU series though, so that'll hopefully polish off a big remaining problem with ordinary distros.

the minisforum ms-r1 has the same SoC and supports UEFI

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