Re: [PATCH 00/28] Initial implementation of bootmethod/bootflow

From: Peter Robinson <pbrobinson@gmail.com>
To: Tom Rini <trini@konsulko.com>
Cc: AKASHI Takahiro <takahiro.akashi@linaro.org>,
	Simon Glass <sjg@chromium.org>,
	 Emmanuel Vadot <manu@bidouilliste.com>,
	Mark Kettenis <mark.kettenis@xs4all.nl>,
	U-Boot Mailing List <u-boot@lists.denx.de>,
	Ilias Apalodimas <ilias.apalodimas@linaro.org>,
	 Steffen Jaeckel <jaeckel-floss@eyet-services.de>,
	Michal Simek <michal.simek@xilinx.com>,
	Dennis Gilmore <dennis@ausil.us>,
	Daniel Schwierzeck <daniel.schwierzeck@gmail.com>,
	 Lukas Auer <lukas.auer@aisec.fraunhofer.de>,
	Jaehoon Chung <jh80.chung@samsung.com>,
	 Matthias Brugger <mbrugger@suse.com>,
	Peng Fan <peng.fan@nxp.com>,  Stephen Warren <swarren@nvidia.com>,
	Stephen Warren <swarren@wwwdotorg.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 00/28] Initial implementation of bootmethod/bootflow
Date: Thu, 26 Aug 2021 12:55:52 +0100	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <CALeDE9MwrmzsPiA3rKQeaCARMJ+TQ2U26H-kZ+WeOV8yF_FAmw@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20210825145635.GV858@bill-the-cat>

> > By "EFI app", do you mean a way of booting "/efi/boot/bootXX.efi"
> > (default file name in case that no image path is specified)?
> >
> > In fact, this behavior, or removable media support, is defined
> > as part of UEFI boot manager in UEFI specification. (See section 3.5)
> > What this means is that the boot order, including a removable media
> > case and user-provided BootXXXX cases, should be controlled solely
> > by "BootOrder" variable.
> > So the current combination of distro_bootcmd + UEFI boot manger doesn't
> > fully comply with the specification.
> >
> > Even if those two cases are integrated, I don't know how "BootOrder"
> > semantics can be preserved in your approach.
>
> I think the high level answer is that whereas today part of
> distro_bootcmd (and so iterating over boot_targets) "bootefi bootmgr"
> gets run, with what Simon is proposing we would have an easier / quicker
> way to get over to just running that.  Perhaps a clean-up to just use
> that, even?  Or are we not to the point yet where we could remove the
> direct fall-back to /efi/boot/bootXX.efi ?

I've not actually got as far as grabbing this series and trying it out
but I like a bunch of the concepts.

If we can use this to replace a bunch of the distro_boot hush script
checks for various devices in which to boot from and make it a more
standardised logic I think that's an overall win. Double bonus points
if we could have an easy way to specify a boot order and even have the
ability to have a "Press F8 to display a boot menu" style option where
a user could select the specific device they wish to attempt to boot
from without having to interrupt the boot, and often dive into
printenv and random commands to try and workout where/where/why to get
it to overide the onboarad eMMC so they can boot off a USB stick!

Peter