[U-Boot] [PATCH 0/6] efi: make efi and bootmgr more usable

[Alexander Graf]

On 17.10.18 09:32, AKASHI Takahiro wrote:
> This patch set is a collection of patches to enhance efi user interfaces
> /commands. It will help improve user experience on efi boot and make it
> more usable without edk2's shell utility.

That's amazing, thanks a lot :)

> Patch#1 to #4 are for efishell.
> Patch#5 and #6 are for bootmgr.
> 
> Let's see how it works:
> => efishell boot add 1 SHELL mmc 0:1 /Shell.efi ""
> => efishell boot add 2 HELLO mmc 0:1 /hello.efi ""
> => efishell boot dump

IMHO those 3 belong semantically to the "bootmgr" command. I can see how
"bootefi bootmgr add 1 SHELL ..." is terrible UX. But then again it's
not too much more to type than "efishell boot", right? ;)

So at the end of the day, these should probably be

 => bootefi bootmgr add 1 SHELL mmc 0:1 /Shell.efi ""
 => bootefi bootmgr add 2 HELLO mmc 0:1 /hello.efi ""
 => bootefi bootmgr dump

> Boot0001:
> 	attributes: A-- (0x00000001)
> 	label: SHELL
> 	file_path: /VenHw(e61d73b9-a384-4acc-aeab-82e828f3628b)/SD(0)/SD(0)/HD(1,MBR,0x086246ba,0x800,0x40000)/\\Shell.efi
> 	data: 
> Boot0002:
> 	attributes: A-- (0x00000001)
> 	label: HELLO
> 	file_path: /VenHw(e61d73b9-a384-4acc-aeab-82e828f3628b)/SD(0)/SD(0)/HD(1,MBR,0x086246ba,0x800,0x40000)/\\hello.efi
> 	data: 
> 
> => efishell boot order 1 2
> => efishell boot order

Same thing here :).

>  1: Boot0001: SHELL
>  2: Boot0002: HELLO
> 
> => bootefi bootmgr -2
> WARNING: booting without device tree
> Booting: HELLO
> ## Starting EFI application at 000000007db8b040 ...
> Hello, world!
> ## Application terminated, r = 0
> 
> => efishell setvar PlatformLang en        <--- important!

That one is slightly more complicated. How about we introduce a -e flag
to all the env operations? Then this would become

 => setenv -e PlatformLang en

and you could print only EFI variables using

 => printenv -e

maybe one day we could then also just implement partial variable storage
for UEFI variables:

 => saveenv -e

which we could then reuse in the ExitBootServices() call to persist EFI
variables?

> => efishell bootmgr -1 or efishell bootmgr
> 
>    (shell ...)
> 
> # The only drawback is that it can be confusing to type
>   "bootefi ..." and "efi(shell) boot ..." :)

Yes :).


Alex