Introduction Pickman is a tool for cherry-picking patches from upstream U-Boot into a downstream branch. It walks the first-parent chain of the source branch, finds merge commits, and cherry-picks their contents one merge at a time using an AI agent. This works well for normal merges containing a handful of commits. But upstream U-Boot occasionally…
Introduction U-Boot on x86_64 has traditionally relied on a Secondary Program Loader (SPL) to bootstrap into 64-bit mode. SPL starts in 16-bit real mode (as required by the x86 reset vector), transitions through 32-bit protected mode, sets up page tables, and finally jumps into the 64-bit U-Boot proper. A recent series adds support for running…
If you use U-Boot’s buildman tool frequently, you are likely familiar with the standard two-step dance. First, you run the build. Then, to really understand what happened—checking for code bloat, size changes, or new warnings—you run buildman -s to generate the summary. While buildman effectively has two modes (building and summarising), treating them as mutually…
Have you ever found yourself wishing for a bit more “modernity” while editing environment variables or command strings at the U-Boot prompt? Our latest patch series brings a suite of enhanced editing features to U-Boot, designed to make the command-line experience much more forgiving and efficient. While these features improve the standard CLI, they were…
As the “Expo” menu system in U-Boot continues to mature, we are moving beyond simple menu selections and into more complex user interaction. One area needing significant attention is text input—specifically, how we handle multi-line text editing and the underlying video console cursor. In a new 16-patch series, we overhaul the textedit object to support…
Automating cherry-picks with AI (as seen in our introduction to pickman) was a huge step forward for U-Boot Concept maintenance. However, as any maintainer knows, theory and practice often collide when you try to apply 260+ commits in a single session. After several weeks of real-world use, we’ve identified three “stress points” in large-scale cherry-picking:…
Managing cherry-picks across multiple branches is one of the more tedious aspects of maintaining a large project like U-Boot. When you need to backport dozens of commits from an upstream branch while handling merge commits, resolving conflicts, and creating merge requests, the process can consume hours of developer time. Today we’re introducing pickman, a new tool…
U-Boot has two testing worlds that rarely meet. Python tests are flexible and can set up complex scenarios – disk images, network configurations, boot environments. C tests are fast, debuggable, and run directly on hardware. What if we could combine them? The Problem Consider filesystem testing. You need to: The Python test framework handles steps…
Have you ever seen output like this from your test suite? That’s not a buffer overflow or memory corruption. It’s a wierd interaction between linker alignment, compiler optimisations, and pointer arithmetic. Let me tell you how we tracked it down. The Mystery U-Boot uses ‘linker lists’ extensively – a pattern where the linker collects scattered…
The robust operation of any complex software system, especially one as foundational as U-Boot, hinges on the reliability of its core services. Among these, dynamic memory allocation via malloc() is paramount. While often taken for granted, failures in malloc() can be silent saboteurs, leading to unpredictable behaviour, security vulnerabilities, or outright system crashes. Here, we…
