NanoPi-R4S-OpenWRT VS heads

You can do better, the NanoPi R4S is $50 for the 1gb model and $70 for the 4gb. It was designed for OpenWRT (more specifically, FriendlyWRT). It's about as good as the RPI4. There's no limit to onboard storage because it uses micro-sd. For most people, myself included, 1gb of ram is more than enough. already has a few unofficial builds and an official one is around the corner. You can follow the discussion right here. The best unofficial build is right here. As you can see, it's a work in progress and it's moving along very quickly.

I downloaded the VGA ROM for my Thinkpad W530 for both the Intel IGPU and Nvidia Quadro K1000M using this and configured the build config to use them with the correct PCI ports (8086,0166 10de,0ffc). Everything works fine except the output for both the VGA and the mini DP port. Does anyone have any ideas of what I could be missing here?

You may be interested in Heads, which is available on Purism laptops under the name PureBoot. Though this really needs a coreboot-capable machine, I think, and isn't something you can just add to your existing UEFI boot chain.

You don't need to encrypt anything to verify those images, you just need to sign them. See how Heads does this.

https://github.com/osresearch/heads

Unfortunately there is also the Heads secure firmware: https://osresearch.net/ as well. Otherwise my vote would go to Heads. Liive OS could be pretty hard to optimize in a search engine, they'll think it's misspelled. Could call it "Miles" and just never ack the reference...

Heads, https://osresearch.net/

If you worried about malicious changes, there is the write lock protection feature in coreboot that prevents internal flashing. This would require you to flash externally whenever you want to update coreboot. If worried someone will also flash your BIOS externally, you may want to look into Heads