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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…
We’ve been working to improve the structure of the ext4l filesystem implementation in U-Boot, specifically targeting the large compatibility layer that allows us to reuse Linux kernel code. We’ve just posted a new 33-patch series that reorganises the compatibility stubs, moving them out of the monolithic ext4_uboot.h and into their proper locations within include/linux/. The…
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…
U-Boot’s expo subsystem provides a way to create graphical menus and forms for user interaction. One key component is the textline object, which allows users to enter text, for example when typing a password or a filename. This post describes recent work to support multiple vidconsole contexts, making it easier for expo to handle multiple…
U-Boot’s codman tool helps developers understand which source files and lines of code are actually compiled into a build. With the latest update, codman gains a powerful new capability: categorising source files by functional area and exporting analysis results to CSV for spreadsheet analysis. The Challenge U-Boot is a massive codebase with over 45,000 source files. When…
The PXE/extlinux boot mechanism is a cornerstone of U-Boot’s standard boot flow. It parses a configuration file (like extlinux.conf), presents a menu, and loads the kernel, initrd, and device tree for the chosen option. A typical configuration file looks like this: While functional, the traditional implementation relied heavily on callbacks: as the parser encountered a…
Buildman is the Swiss Army knife of U-Boot development. It handles the heavy lifting of building hundreds of boards in parallel, fetching the correct toolchains, and—perhaps most importantly—analysing the impact of your patches across git history. Whether you are checking for code bloat or verifying that a refactor doesn’t break a board you don’t own,…
A recent series in Concept enables ext4l for an ARM board, finally allowing us to make a concrete comparison between the code size of this new Linux-ported driver and the existing U-Boot implementation. Here is a short note on what we found. The “Linux is Large” Reality The first observation is that the Linux kernel…
U-Boot’s suite of Python tools—including buildman, patman, and binman—are critical parts of our development workflow. However, like any long-lived software project, technical debt accumulates. Buildman in particular was written a while ago, without much use of pylint and has grown significantly over the years. The accumulated pylint warnings, inconsistent naming conventions, and a monolithic structure…
Developing for U-Boot often involves chasing down elusive memory leaks and waiting for long test suites to finish. A recent series of 29 patches is aimed squarely at improving the developer experience in these areas. This series introduces powerful new malloc debugging tools, optimises the video subsystem, and significantly improves the performance of the test/py…
