[PATCH v4 00/29] arm: Support building as an EFI app

[Tom Rini]

On Fri, Feb 14, 2025 at 08:22:21PM -0700, Simon Glass wrote:

> The original x86 EFI-app was written back in 2015, about a year before
> the EFI-loader was introduced. At that point, ARM mostly used U-Boot and
> FIT (Flat Image Tree).
> 
> Today, sadly, there are a few efforts to re-invent FIT poorly, to cater
> to more primitive boot-environments than U-Boot. One justification for
> this re-invetion has been that EDK2 did not support FIT.
> 
> EDK2 does now support FIT but only for the firmware stage. Even then,
> vendors tend to use their own forks, so any new features are slow to
> make it into the market.
> 
> EDK2 also supports the ext4 filesystem, but many devices don't include
> that feature, so most distros make use of FAT for storing their boot
> files. Since FAT is not journalled, it is not particularly reliable in
> the face of reset, power failure, etc.
> 
> As an interim measure, we can use U-Boot as an EFI app running on top of
> whatever EDK2 fork is in use. This allows use of modern features such as
> FIT and filesystems other than FAT. So far this only supports x86, but
> recent ARM laptops are making use of EFI too.
> 
> So this series adds an EFI app for 64-bit ARM.
> 
> Note: Since U-Boot does not support EFI's GOP 'blt-only' mode, the
> vidconsole does not operate, but it can still be used, since EDK2
> handles drawing instead of U-Boot. As a result, the U-Boot logo is not
> shown.

You did miss some of the tags I provided against v3, fwiw.

-- 
Tom
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