We’ve just merged a fix in Concept for a particularly tricky memory corruption bug in the U-Boot sandbox environment. This bug was difficult to track down, so we wanted to share the story of the investigation and the solution. The Symptom: Mysterious Heap Corruption The problem first appeared as random and hard-to-reproduce memory corruption in…
For a while now, U-Boot’s EFI application (efi_app) has been a handy tool, but with one noticeable difference between architectures: x86 could show things on the screen, while ARM was stuck in the dark. If you wanted a splash screen or a graphical boot menu in your ARM EFI app, you were out of luck….
Continuous Integration (CI) is the backbone of a large project like U-Boot, ensuring that every change is tested against a huge matrix of boards and configurations. While this comprehensive testing is vital for quality, it can also be time-consuming. When you’re focused on a specific feature, waiting for a full “world build” to complete can…
The Flattened Image Tree (FIT) is at the heart of modern U-Boot booting, providing a flexible and verifiable way to package kernels, ramdisks, and devicetrees. A new series introduces a significant enhancement to how U-Boot processes FITs, enabling a powerful two-stage boot process. This allows a “load-only” FIT to configure the system (like setting up…
As U-Boot’s support for hardware grows, so does the complexity of managing build configurations. A single board might require several build variations—for example, one with network support and one without, or a standard build versus one tailored for Android booting. Historically, managing these variations often meant duplicating large defconfig files, a maintenance headache waiting to…
In the world of embedded systems, a Flattened Image Tree (FIT) is the standard way to package a bootable OS, typically bundling the kernel, a ramdisk, and the necessary devicetree (FDT) into a single, verifiable file. While convenient, this approach tightly couples the OS with its hardware description. But what if the OS and the…
We’re excited to announce a significant new feature in U-Boot: a virtio-scsi driver. While U-Boot has long supported virtio-blk for block device access in virtualized environments, virtio-scsi offers greater flexibility, allowing a single virtio device to host multiple disks (LUNs) and supporting features like hotplug. This comprehensive 27-patch series, does more than just add a…
The U-Boot boot process relies heavily on the Flattened Image Tree (FIT) format to package kernels, ramdisks, device trees, and other components. At the heart of this lies the fit_image_load() function, which is responsible for parsing the FIT, selecting the right images, and loading them into memory. Over the years, as more features like the…
The integration of pytest with real boards (test.py) was written by Stephen Warren of Nvidia, some 9 years ago. It has certainly stood the test of time. The original code has been tweaked for various purposes over the years, but considering the number of tests added in that time, the changes are very small. Here…
U-Boot has a new continuous integration (CI) lab page that provides a real-time look at the status of various development boards. The page, located at https://lab.u-boot.org/, offers a simple and clean interface that allows developers and curious people to quickly check on the health and activity of each board in the lab. When you first…
