Community Spotlight | Development Updates | New Features | Refactoring and Code Improvements | Releases | The Lab | Uncategorized |
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…
The EFI app on x86 has supported booting for a while. With a recent 19-part series, the EFI app can now also boot an OS on ARM. This uses standard boot and the standard extlinux boot flow. The Core Fixes To successfully hand off control from the EFI environment to a new operating system, a…
A robust and efficient test suite is the backbone of a healthy open-source project. It gives developers the confidence to add new features and refactor code without causing regressions. Recently, we’ve merged a significant 19-patch series that begins a much-needed cleanup of our Python test infrastructure, paving the way for faster, more reliable, and more…
We’ve just merged a fix in Concept for a particularly tricky memory corruption bug in the U-Boot sandbox environment. This bug was difficult to track down, so we wanted to share the story of the investigation and the solution. The Symptom: Mysterious Heap Corruption The problem first appeared as random and hard-to-reproduce memory corruption in…
For a while now, U-Boot’s EFI application (efi_app) has been a handy tool, but with one noticeable difference between architectures: x86 could show things on the screen, while ARM was stuck in the dark. If you wanted a splash screen or a graphical boot menu in your ARM EFI app, you were out of luck….
Continuous Integration (CI) is the backbone of a large project like U-Boot, ensuring that every change is tested against a huge matrix of boards and configurations. While this comprehensive testing is vital for quality, it can also be time-consuming. When you’re focused on a specific feature, waiting for a full “world build” to complete can…
The Flattened Image Tree (FIT) is at the heart of modern U-Boot booting, providing a flexible and verifiable way to package kernels, ramdisks, and devicetrees. A new series introduces a significant enhancement to how U-Boot processes FITs, enabling a powerful two-stage boot process. This allows a “load-only” FIT to configure the system (like setting up…
As U-Boot’s support for hardware grows, so does the complexity of managing build configurations. A single board might require several build variations—for example, one with network support and one without, or a standard build versus one tailored for Android booting. Historically, managing these variations often meant duplicating large defconfig files, a maintenance headache waiting to…
In the world of embedded systems, a Flattened Image Tree (FIT) is the standard way to package a bootable OS, typically bundling the kernel, a ramdisk, and the necessary devicetree (FDT) into a single, verifiable file. While convenient, this approach tightly couples the OS with its hardware description. But what if the OS and the…
We’re excited to announce a significant new feature in U-Boot: a virtio-scsi driver. While U-Boot has long supported virtio-blk for block device access in virtualized environments, virtio-scsi offers greater flexibility, allowing a single virtio device to host multiple disks (LUNs) and supporting features like hotplug. This comprehensive 27-patch series, does more than just add a…
