[PATCH 0/7] pxe_utils: small fixups, implement BLS type 1 boot on top of them

[Alexey Charkov]

On Thu, Jun 4, 2026 at 8:05 PM Tom Rini <trini at konsulko.com> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Jun 04, 2026 at 07:31:05PM +0400, Alexey Charkov wrote:
>
> > Add support for the Boot Loader Specification (BLS) type 1 boot entries,
> > as generated by default by systemd's kernel-install when loader=bls.
> >
> > Given that the format of BLS entries is pretty much the same as PXElinux,
> > reuse the existing library for the parsing logic.
> >
> > BLS type 2 entries are out of scope, as they are effectively just EFI
> > applications and should be booted as such.
> >
> > This implementation is also only allowing a single top-sorting entry to
> > boot, as the standard boot infrastruture currently doesn't support
> > multiple entries per partition-bootmeth tuple. I have a proposed extension
> > to enable that and will post it separately as RFC - that enables the use
> > of `bootflow menu` to select the kernel to boot without jumping through
> > several menus with different behavior as is currently required with
> > extlinux.conf.
> >
> > Signed-off-by: Alexey Charkov <alchark at flipper.net>
>
> This is good to see, thanks for posting it. One concern I have is that
> out of 1529 platforms, this would be enabled on 1392 of them. And the
> size growth is around 1.5 kilobytes. Is there some smaller percentage of
> platforms this should be "default y" for ? Or is the expectation that
> something like Debian will be configuring for this moving forward, so
> yes even something like PowerPC platforms be using this? Thanks!

Well this is the config format that systemd's kernel-install produces
out of the box, and it doesn't require EFI support unlike UKI (a.k.a.
BLS type 2). So one could argue that any system shipping with systemd
benefits directly. In my view, that makes it more accessible for end
users than e.g. bootmeth_extlinux, which is also "default y" but I
could only find a suitable config generator for it with device tree
support in Debian (not in Fedora, nor in Gentoo out of my extremely
representative sample of N=3 distros).

Happy to make it conditional on whatever platforms find this helpful
though, or drop "default y" altogether. I personally only care about
ARM, and Rockchip in particular :)

Best regards,
Alexey