Hector Martin on Nostr: There is no firmware (in the sense of UEFI). u-boot is the first component that ...

There is no firmware (in the sense of UEFI). u-boot is the first component that provides something you might call "firmware" in the sense of a platform you run other code on (its UEFI environment). That's why we use it.

m1n1 itself has NVMe block support and a FAT32 driver which it uses to load its second stage and u-boot, but it does not export itself as any kind of API like UEFI.