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…
Over the last few months (and since the last post) the mouse support in U-Boot Concept has matured quite a bit. The various performance improvements have had a big impact and the UI is now smooth and useable. Here’s a video: So what’s next? Let’s look at a few topics. Touchpads So far touchpads are…
My first ARM machine was an Archimedes way back in about 1987. I received the first unit sold in New Zealand. At some point my machine started running Acorn’s RISC OS. For me, some of the amazing things about RISC OS were anti-aliased outline fonts, a string-sound generator which worked without a data table and…
I’ve been experimenting with AI coding tools, mostly Claude, for the last few months. Here are some thoughts on my experience so far. Things I have tried So far I have tried using Claude for many different tasks: First, a caveat. I am a beginner at using this technology and do not spend much time…
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…
In the world of software development, consistency is key. A recent update to U-Boot Concept takes a solid step in that direction by restructuring how it handles emulation targets. This change makes life easier for developers working across different processor architectures. Previously there were inconsistencies in the configuration system (Kconfig). For example, enabling QEMU emulation…
