Installing UEFI Firmware on ARM SBCs

Summary

I am a huge fan of my Rock 5 ITX+. It wraps an ATX power connector, a 4-pin Molex, PoE support, 32 GB of eMMC, front-panel USB 2.0, and two Gen 3×2 M.2 slots around a Rockchip 3588 SoC that can slot into any Mini-ITX case. Thing is, I never put it in a case because the microSD slot lives on the side of the board, and pulling the case out and removing the side panel to install a new OS got old with a quickness.I originally wanted to rackmount the critter, but adding a deracking difficulty multiplier to the microSD slot minigame seemed a bit souls-like for my taste. So what am I going to do? Grab a microSD extender and hang that out the back? Nay! I’m going to neuralyze the SPI flash and install some Kelvin Timeline firmware that will allow me to boot and install generic ARM Linux images from USB.At least, that’s the plan 🙂EDK2 RK3588EDK2-RK3588 is a UEFI firmware implementation based on EDK2 for various RK3588 boards. It delivers a PC-like, standardised boot experience, supporting multiple operating systems, such as Windows, Linux, BSD, and VMware ESXi. At least, that’s what it says on the tin. In a perfect world, I could write the EDK2 firmware to a microSD and try before you buy. Welp, that’s not going to work on the Rock 5 ITX+ because it’s a wee bit, what’s a polite way to put this, special. Not only does the microSD trick not work, it also refuses to let me boot the EDK2 firmware from eMMC.Time to break out the neuralyzer!ARMBIANTo pull off this roundabout feat of engineering, I first need to boot the Rock 5 ITX+ to a desktop, and there is exactly one correct answer to that problem: Armbian 25.2.2 Noble Gnome with kernel 6.1.Once booted to the desktop, it’s time to crack open a copy of Chromium, head over to the EDK2-RK3588 GitHub page, and download the latest rock-5-itx UEFI release. Remember the “specialness” I talked about earlier? Yeah, the Rock 5 ITX+ exposes the SPI flash as a standard 17 MB block device, meaning I can flash the UEFI image with GNOME Disks...