RPi3

> Isn't a faster boot what everybody wants? I’ll rather have slow boot and proper UEFI support so I can boot any vanilla ARM64 Linux distro (Debian proper), instead of images/distros which have been crafted to be device-specific (Raspbian). I boot this thing once every second month at most. I honestly couldn’t care less about boot-times. Luckily for me, there are solutions to my problem too ;) https://github.com/pftf/RPi3

Odd to see using UEFI to NetBoot not considered an option at all. It should eliminate whatever timing-bugs you have and leave you in a more reliable (and scriptable!) pre-boot environment. What more do you need?!? Both the RPi3 and 4 can be UEFI booted, so this is definitely a real-world option. Links: - https://github.com/pftf/RPi3 - https://github.com/pftf/RPi4

Oh, that's excellent. The same group doing the RPi4 UEFI stuff also does a version for the Pi 3: https://github.com/pftf/RPi3

If you already have the SD card and USB, your probably better off using https://github.com/pftf/RPi3/releases/tag/v1.30 which is a open source UEFI implementation. Its far more capable of dealing with underlying os updates using your OS's preferred update method. You put the UEFI firmware on the SD, update the config.txt to point at it, and then pretend the rpi is a normal x86/uefi system and use apt/zypper/dnf/whatever for updates (including the kernel). Everything then boots/runs/updates off the USB disk. The arm ecosystem seems to be slowly moving to some form of UEFI+grub boot for all the linux/etc distributions and away from all these platform specific boot methods.