[U-Boot] Bare x86 support is merged to u-boot-x86

[Simon Glass]

Hi Andy,

On 25 November 2014 at 15:08, Andy Pont <andy.pont at sdcsystems.com> wrote:
> Hi Simon (and Bin),
>
>> I've applied the remaining x86 patches to u-boot-x86. It runs on
>> chromebook_link (Pixel) with support for most hardware relevant to a
>> boot loader: SDRAM, SPI, PCI, USB (and USB Ethernet), SATA (internal
>> 32GB SSD), SD card, LCD, UART, keyboard, EC.
>>
>> Bin this should be a good base for you to send patches for your Atom
>> platform and I have no major work pending now so should not get in
>> your way.
>
> Thanks for all of your efforts on getting some x86 support into U-Boot.
> Hopefully in the new year when project work is back under control I will
> have some time to get involved with this - I have almost 20 years experience
> porting commercial BIOS and UEFI solutions for x86 hardware and possibly a
> bunch of Atom C2750 hardware arriving in January.

Sounds great! I do wonder whether U-Boot could support some UEFI protocols.

>
> Other than the list of missing features, what are your long term
> goals/ambitions/desires with x86 support in U-Boot?  From what I can see on
> the Coreboot mailing list it isn't the friendliest of people and doesn't
> seem to know how to deal with the binary blobs that both Intel and AMD seem
> to mandate for their chipsets now.

It would be nice to make x86 a first-class U-Boot citizen, meaning
that it has a reasonable set of features as required by a reasonable
set of modern boards. That means supporting a few more classes of
chipsets. Then we get all the features that U-Boot has, hopefully
without to much of the BIOS-era baggage that x86 often brings along
(U-Boot is pretty simple to understand). I'm pretty happy that the
current port fits well into the U-Boot philosophy.

The binary blobs are certainly a problem, but we deal with them in
other cases also - e.g. some ARM SoCs require a signed pre-boot image.
Something to discuss I suppose.

Regards,
Simon