U-Boot Concept Tree Proposal

[Michal Simek]

On 6/30/26 00:21, Tom Rini wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 26, 2026 at 08:07:16PM +0200, Quentin Schulz wrote:
> 
> [snip]
>> I'll finish that my gut feeling (shared with some of my current and former
>> colleagues) is that U-Boot is disappointingly unstable. Unlike the Linux
>> kernel, U-Boot suffers from fewer eyes looking at code, fewer people
>> developing it, fewer people testing master or even any recent release (the
>> number of reports we have for bugs on releases from years ago...), and lack
>> of proper and extensive CI test infrastructure (and if we have some, it's
>> heavily centralized into a handful of people's offices). I loathe every time
>> I need to update U-Boot because I don't know what I'll have to debug for
>> days or if I really do test everything there's to test (is it my fault for
>> not keeping up with master, yes, but I shouldn't feel this way).
>> So I really think we could have much more confidence in code being merged if
>> we had more testing, possibly on real hardware, possibly by companies
>> offering to do some proper CI (e.g. like Intel is doing with Yocto, spending
>> days testing release candidates before the project tags a release). Maybe
>> with distros slowly adopting Aarch64 and U-Boot with it we'll have more
>> coverage. I know you've worked on labgrid support for U-Boot and you have
>> some merge request(s) still open there but it seems you're hitting the same
>> wall there you're hitting here.
> 
> Thanks for the feedback here. I've been staying out of this general
> thread as I believe my thoughts are well known already.
> 
> For the specific topic here, part of it comes down I believe to a very
> uneven level of testing. Both AMD/Xilinx and TI (and in turn, a number
> of their vendors) have labs and run tests with a good deal of frequency.
> I suspect NXP has some testing going on too, and this isn't an intended
> as an exhaustive list. But others really are very much volunteer lead
> and getting a reliable and remote lab setup really is a lot of work, so
> no one has done it. Rockchip is an unfortunate example here that I know
> you run in to. I have an rk3399 I've been trying to find time and space
> to get up in the sage lab, for example, but it's still just not there.

This is a topic which we should talk about more.
It is clear that we can't expect that internal labs will join our project
because it is very difficult to provide an access through infrastructure.
Also you can't wait for companies to finish their testing before release.

But on the other hand developers have enough HW on their desks which shouldn't 
be that difficult to share. That's why I think we should provide much easier
way how to share these HW and wire it up with u-boot CI. That could also allow 
to connect custom qemu models instead of just upstream version.

Thanks,
Michal