On Wed, Aug 18, 2021 at 09:45:33PM -0600, Simon Glass wrote:
Bootmethod and bootflow provide a built-in way for U-Boot to automatically boot an Operating System without custom scripting and other customisation:
- bootmethod - a method to scan a device to find bootflows (owned by U-Boot)
- bootflow - a description of how to boot (owned by the distro)
This series provides an initial implementation of these, enable to scan for bootflows from MMC and Ethernet. The only bootflow supported is distro boot, i.e. an extlinux.conf file included on a filesystem or tftp server. It works similiarly to the existing script-based approach, but is native to U-Boot.
With this we can boot on a Raspberry Pi 3 with just one command:
bootflow scan -lb
which means to scan, listing (-l) each bootflow and trying to boot each one (-b). The final patch shows this.
It is intended that this approach be expanded to support mechanisms other than distro boot, including EFI-related ones. With a standard way to identify boot devices, these features become easier. It also should support U-Boot scripts, for backwards compatibility only.
The first patch of this series moves boot-related code out of common/ and into a new boot/ directory. This helps to collect these related files in one place, as common/ is quite large.
Like sysboot, this feature makes use of the existing PXE implementation. Much of this series consists of cleaning up that code and refactoring it into something closer to a module that can be called, teasing apart its reliance on the command-line interpreter to access filesystems and the like. Also it now uses function arguments and its own context struct internally rather than environment variables, which is very hard to follow. No core functional change is included in the included PXE patches.
For documentation, see the 'doc' patch.
There is quite a long list of future work included in the documentation. One question is the choice of naming. Since this is a bootloader, should we just call this a 'method' and a 'flow' ? The 'boot' prefix is already shared by other commands like bootm, booti, etc.
The design is described here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ggW0KJpUOR__vBkj3l61L2dav4ZkNC12/view?usp=s...
The series is available at u-boot-dm/bmea-working
My question / concern is this. Would the next step here be to implement the generic UEFI boot path? Today, I can write Fedora 34 for AArch64 to a USB stick, boot U-Boot off of uSD card and the installer automatically boots. I'm sure I could do the same with the BSDs. Reading the documentation left me with the impression that every OSV would be expected to write something, so that their installer / OS boot. But there's already standards for that, which they do, and we should be implementing (and do, via the current distro_boot) or making easier to enable. Thanks!