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

[Simon Glass]

Hi Tom,

On Fri, 21 Feb 2025 at 13:45, Tom Rini <trini at konsulko.com> wrote:
>
> 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.

I see this is marked as 'deferred' in patchwork. I'm going to apply it
to my tree.

If you like, I could do a pull request against -next with the EFI-app updates.

Regards,
Simon