[Miscellaneous Android Development] martyfender:
My first Nextbook Ares 8A, v1.1.1, did not have activation. The second tablet I bought, had it, v1.2.0. In the past I had flashed v1.20 to the v1.1.1 and had audio, bluetooth and wifi. I found if you flash a different major version series, for example, a v2 series rom to a v1 device, the sound is lost from the external speaker. However, I found out later that bluetooth sound did work. My five tablets have v1.1.1, v1.2.0, 2.0.3, v2.1.5 and v3.0.4.

The v1.1.1 has IFWI, (Intel Firmware Interface) of M882_jj.018.

The v1.2.0 has IFWI M882_jj.019.

The v2.1.5 has IFWI M882_jj.021_JJ.

The v2.0.3 and the v3.0.4 are the only two tablets that have the same IFWI, M882_JJ.023_JJ.

I assume you have a USB-OTG cable to be able to hook a mouse and keyboard to change the uefi bios settings. I have never done that but have thought about getting one of those cables. I wasn't aware that Linux could boot on it. The only Linux I have used as my daily driver that I am writing from is Linux Mint a persistent, USB drive booted version I have been using almost daily despite still having Windows 7 on the actual hardrive. It runs so well and faster, that I rarely ever boot to Windows anymore.

Just out of curiosity, what chipset did you change to? Maybe the different versions of the tablet have different chipsets?

On 4 out of the 5 tablets, I can no longer access the external SD card slot. For a long time I kept a micro SD in them and it would intermittently work until the device was asleep then would not be able to be accessed again, sometimes ejecting and reinserting it would bring it back after a long and resource hogging disk check scan. I finally took the cards out because this intermittent scan slowed the devices down to much. Reinstalls of the rom and new SD cards known to be good never fixed it, so I gave up.

I don't usually have wifi cut out, but if the device sleeps, it is often slow to reconnect and sometimes I have to toggle wifi off in settings and back on, for it to come back up.

Other than these Android tablets, I have never owned any devices with UEFI. My old desktops have always had standard, legacy bios.

I have, however worked on a few Windows machines with UEFI bios.

What kind of settings can you set in it?

I wonder if wonder if the SD card readers have failed or if something in UEFI has been corrupted? Standard, legacy bios seem to have no problems in this regard. I wonder if UEFI bios can?

So you think bootloader 2 is not used? I wondered why a second one was there or if it was some kind of failsafe backup.

Somewhere, I don't remember where, I found dd commands to pull all of the partitions from one of the devices. I have them saved to my Linux pc

I have tried to figure out if the IFWI is in the bootloader, or if it actually resides in firmware or the UEFI bios.

Most of this really does not matter, but I have always been the curious type, who as a kid in the early 1960's, always liked to take things apart to see how they worked!

Please do keep me updated on this as I am very interested in it.

Have you rooted it yet? I can strongly recommend the latest Canary builds of Magisk or one of the unofficial builds, if you like testing the latest cutting edge versions, with the latest commits and fixes in it.

Both [MENTION=3306843]kantjer[/MENTION] 's and [MENTION=7187684]ianmacd[/MENTION] 's unofficial build are very good.

Canary builds are probably safer, or the stable v18 should work good on all of these devices.

Thanks