The effort to modernise U-Boot’s filesystem support continues with a major update to ext4l—the new ext4 driver ported directly from Linux. A recent series series of 30 patches that brings full write capabilities to the driver. So far ext4l has only supported reading. With this series, the driver now supports the full lifecycle of file…
Developing for U-Boot often involves juggling a variety of tools: buildman for compilation, patman for patch submission, test.py for integration testing, and git for version control. While these tools are powerful individually, orchestrating them—especially when dealing with complex CI pipelines and dependencies—can be tedious. To bridge these gaps, we are introducing uman (U-Boot Manager), a…
Testing is the backbone of U-Boot development, but as the test suite grows, so does the friction involved in running it. Whether it is the time it takes to regenerate disk images or the difficulty of parsing test output in CI, there is always room for improvement. A recent series of 9 patches in Concept…
In the world of bootloaders, balance is everything. We need enough functionality to load an OS, but we must keep the footprint small and the code maintainable. For years, U-Boot has relied on a custom implementation of the EXT4 filesystem. However, as the EXT4 format evolves with features like metadata checksums and fast commits, keeping…
A new series just landed, focussed on making one part of U-Boot’s new graphical menus (Expo) considerably better with non-popup menus. A long-standing and annoying limitation in expo is that couldn’t really type into text fields (like for passwords) if the menu wasn’t a pop-up (i.e. as used by the ‘cedit’ configuration editor). Now, with…
Expo is U-Boot’s forms and UI subsystem. It supports text, images and menus and a large expo can contain quite a bit of information. How do you debug and understand that? Tracing through large, linked data structures is not fun. U-Boot Concept now has an expo_dump() function, designed to be called from your code when…
Testing boot scenarios in very important but there are quite a lot of them! Concept currently has about 13 images containing various partitions and files used by the bootstd tests. These are listed in test.dts, for example: All images are built by test_ut_dm_init_bootstd(), but most of these are disabled by default, to avoid making sandbox…
U-Boot’s ‘expo’ toolkit is used for creating user interfaces, such as the configuration editor (cedit) and graphical boot menus (bootflow menu). Previously, user interaction with expo scenes was limited to the keyboard. A recent 23-patch series introduces support for mouse and touchpad interaction. New Input Handling For devices where a mouse or touchpad is available,…
The U-Boot EFI application is a powerful tool, allowing U-Boot to run on top of existing UEFI firmware. This is increasingly important as we see new platforms, especially in the ARM64 world, shipping with complex, ACPI-based firmware. A prime example is the recent wave of laptops powered by the Qualcomm X-Elite, which rely on this…
If you are interested in watching the development of U-Boot Concept, consider joining the mailing list. You can do this in your web browser here, or send an email with ‘subscribe’ in the subject to concept-join@u-boot.org. If you are able to review patches or contribute your own, please do! Also the patchwork server is up and…
