On Sun, Apr 24, 2022 at 11:30:53PM -0600, Simon Glass wrote:
The bootflow feature provide a built-in way for U-Boot to automatically boot an Operating System without custom scripting and other customisation. This is called 'standard boot' since it provides a standard way for U-Boot to boot a distro, without scripting.
It introduces the following concepts:
- bootdev - a device which can hold a distro
- bootmeth - a method to scan a bootdev to find bootflows (owned by U-Boot)
- bootflow - a description of how to boot (owned by the distro)
This series provides an implementation of these, enabled to scan for bootflows from MMC, USB and Ethernet. It supports the existing distro boot as well as the EFI loader flow (bootefi/bootmgr). It works similiarly to the existing script-based approach, but is native to U-Boot.
I've put most of this cover letter in the merge commit, and applied this to u-boot/master. This is an incremental starting point at providing a alternative way of constructing and controlling the load and execute OS stage of booting. There is some growth on most platforms for this, but it is a reasonable alternative and will be iterated on.