The Lab

U-Boot’s Verified Boot for Embedded (VBE) uses multiple boot phases – TPL, VPL, SPL and U-Boot proper – each with a different set of drivers enabled. On rk3399 boards using the DesignWare MMC controller, VPL does not include the CLK framework, to keep the binary small. This causes an intermittent card-enumeration failure that was surprisingly…

If you have several machines on your network and want to get builds done more quickly, a new patch series in Concept adds distributed builds to buildman. It spreads work across remote machines over SSH, so you can throw all your available hardware at a build and get results in a fraction of the time. This is…

U-Boot Concept now has built-in memory-leak detection that can be enabled with a single flag. It snapshots the heap before each test and reports any new allocations left behind afterwards, with full caller backtraces showing exactly where the leaked memory was allocated. The problem U-Boot’s driver model creates and destroys hundreds of devices during each…

We’ve been using Claude Code for U-Boot development and it’s genuinely useful — writing tests, debugging driver issues, working through refactoring. But running an AI with full access to my dev machine makes one…nervous. So we added a cc subcommand to uman, a tool for managing common U-Boot development tasks, that runs Claude Code inside an LXC container….

If you maintain patches against more than one U-Boot tree (or another project), you have probably wished that patman could remember which mailing list, SMTP identity and patchwork server to use for each one. A new 32-patch series adds exactly that: first-class support for multiple upstreams, each with its own send settings and patchwork integration….

Pickman automates cherry-picking commits from upstream U-Boot into a downstream branch, packaging each batch as a GitLab merge request. Until now, when a CI pipeline failed on one of those MRs — a build error caused by a missing context change, a renamed symbol — a human had to read the logs, find the problem,…

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…