I just stumbled across armbian recently and I must say I really like it.
I wanted to use UEFI, but my orangepi cm5 modules don't seem to have the SPI chip needed to store the UEFI there, so I'd have to load it on a partition and lose out on some features like persisting variables across boot.
The arm ecosystem really needs to settle on some sort of universal boot loader / firmware layer and stop just hacking up the linux kernel and not contributing back to it.
I'm not an Arm dev and am just a consumer so I may be misunderstanding, but isn't Arm SystemReady pretty much the thing that's intended to solve the problem you're talking about (among others)?
It is, but it seems like only servers are adopting it at the moment. Or high end ARM workstations. I can't think of any consumer devices or SBC's off the top of my head that support it.
I wanted to use UEFI, but my orangepi cm5 modules don't seem to have the SPI chip needed to store the UEFI there, so I'd have to load it on a partition and lose out on some features like persisting variables across boot.
The arm ecosystem really needs to settle on some sort of universal boot loader / firmware layer and stop just hacking up the linux kernel and not contributing back to it.