From: Peter Robinson pbrobinson@gmail.com Date: Wed, 25 Aug 2021 14:29:45 +0100
Exactly. Keep in mind that RISC-V is looking into EBBR as well, so this is far from an 'Arm thing'. Moreover, the efi stub side of the kernel for risc-v, will only load an initrd using the EFI_LOAD_FILE2 protocol we added support for. So right now the only way to properly boot a RISC-V with EFI is through the manager.
I had heard that RISC-V was just going to use UEFI (and not U-Boot), but perhaps that is not correct. So far I have not really done anything with RISC-V so am not familiar with it.
My understanding is the intention is to just use UEFI of which U-Boot has a UEFI implementation.
The HiFive Unmatched ships with U-Boot. I'm booting OpenBSD via UEFI on that board by using the uSD card that came with the board.
The folks pushing the spec for RISC-V server hardware are probably considering a more traditional UEFI implementation for those systems since they also seem to be pushing for ACPI. But they explicitly mention EBBR for "embedded" systems, and EBBR was deliberately designed to allow the implementation of compliant systems using U-Boot's UEFI implementation.