I really think that the whole “CPU mess” is around the same problem:
- absurd CPU ordering making interrupt distribution etc a real pain
- windows not liking what it’s being presented
Are you guys sure that by presenting consistent clusters this would not simply address the problem ?
It’s rather strange that only this board with this very baroque CPU ordering is experiencing trouble, to the point that one has to disable 1/3 of the CPU cores. From the very beginning this has sounded very fishy to me and I sincerely hoped that this design mess would ultimately be addressed. I’m noting that along all the questions around that topic from the very first days, nobody ever provided a response about the reason why cores are ordered in that crazy mode. I.e. either we can force the SoC to boot from the A520, or we need to present the full suite of cores consistently to the operating system even if that means presenting the big ones first. But the current approach is totally broken. I have to agree with @tkaiser here, it’s not the first Arm board that windows boots on and which has different CPU cores. In addition these ones present the same set of flags, so I’m really suspecting that the only problem windows is facing is that the logical CPUs do not match the physical ones.
But with the binary-only BIOS it’s impossible to investigate. I spent two full week-ends on that already and have to give up by not understanding what I was seeing 
Please at least try to present the CPUs as they should be and test again. The current situation is the worst anyway.