U-Boot Blog

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Booting Up the U-Boot Blog!

Booting Up the U-Boot Blog!

Welcome to the new official blog for Das U-Boot! For over two decades, the U-Boot mailing list has been the vibrant hub of our development discussions. While the mailing list remains our primary channel for patches and technical conversations, this blog will serve as a new platform to share deeper insights, project news, and community […]

Booting into Linux in 100ms

Booting into Linux in 100ms

A few weeks ago I took a look at Qboot, a minimal x86 firmware for QEMU which can boot in milliseconds. Qboot was written by Paolo Bonzini and dates from 2015 and there is an LWN article with the original announcement. I tried it on my machine and it booted in QEMU (with kvm) in […]

Booting Up the U-Boot Blog!

20 June 2025 No Comments

Welcome to the new official blog for Das U-Boot! For over two decades, the U-Boot mailing list has been the vibrant hub of our development discussions. While the mailing list remains our primary channel for patches and technical conversations, this blog will serve as a new platform to share deeper insights, project news, and community stories in a more accessible format. As of mid-2025, U-Boot is more critical to the embedded ecosystem than ever. Our development is thriving, with robust support spanning a vast array of architectures from ARM and x86 to the rapidly expanding world of RISC-V. U-Boot provides a flexible, powerful foundation for countless products in the industrial, automotive and consumer-electronics spaces, incorporating modern standards like FIT, EFI and Firmware Handoff to meet today’s demanding security and interoperability requirements. This blog is a community platform, and we need your voice to make it a success. We invite developers, […]

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Booting into Linux in 100ms

22 June 2025 No Comments

A few weeks ago I took a look at Qboot, a minimal x86 firmware for QEMU which can boot in milliseconds. Qboot was written by Paolo Bonzini and dates from 2015 and there is an LWN article with the original announcement. I tried it on my machine and it booted in QEMU (with kvm) in about 20ms, from entering Qboot to entering Linux. Very impressive! I was intrigued as to what makes it so fast. There is another repo, qemu-boot-time by Stefan Garzarella, which provides an easy means to benchmark the boot. It uses perf events in Linux to detect the start and end of Qboot. Using x86 post codes, I added the same to U-Boot. Initially the boot time was 2.9 seconds! Terrible. Here is a script which works on my machine and measures the time taken for U-Boot boot, using the qemu-x86_64 target: It turned out that almost […]

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