A year of Bootlin contributions to U-Boot

We regularly post about Bootlin contributions to the Linux kernel, but we more rarely post about our U-Boot contributions. Even though we are a bit less active in U-Boot than we are in Linux, we do quite a bit of upstream U-Boot work as well. In this blog post, we do a review of our most significant U-Boot contributions in 2018.

U-Boot 2018.03

Maxime Ripard contributed support for using multiple U-Boot environments. Thanks to this, multiple U-Boot environment backends can be compiled into a single U-Boot binary, so that it can support falling back to a different environment backend if needed. For example, U-Boot can try to load an environment from a file in a FAT partition, and if that fails, try to load from raw MMC storage. As explained by Maxime Ripard in his cover letter, this is useful to help converting Allwinner-based platforms from an environment stored in raw MMC to an environment stored in a FAT partition.

U-Boot 2018.05

Miquèl Raynal contributed support for the Allwinner A33 based Nintendo NES Classic platform. It was also the first Allwinner A33 platform supported in U-Boot that boots from NAND, so as part of this work, Miquèl had to change the Allwinner NAND driver used in the SPL to make it work on Allwinner A31, which required using PIO transfers instead of DMA, and a number of other changes.

U-Boot 2018.07

Miquèl Raynal contributed generic support for TPMv2, and also specifically support for TPMv2 chips over SPI. We will publish a more detailed blog post about this topic in the near future.

U-Boot 2018.09

Quentin Schulz improved the env import command so that it can filter the environment variables it loads from the provided environment. This allows to white-list only a few selected environment variables in cases where the system is locked down by secure boot, but we still need a small writable U-Boot environment to store a few variables. As part of this release, Miquèl Raynal also contributed a few TPM-related fixes.

U-Boot 2018.11

  • Miquèl Raynal contributed a lot of changes in the MTD subsystem, which brought support for SPI NAND flash memories in U-Boot. We described this work in a previous blog post. Boris Brezillon helped by submitting a number of fixes related to this effort.
  • Miquèl Raynal contributed a new mtd command, which can be used in a generic way to access all flash memories. This command will replace commands such as sf, nand, etc. We will publish in the near future a separate blog post about this topic.
  • Quentin Schulz contributed a SPI controller driver for the ARM PL022 SPI controller, which we are using on an old STMicro SPEAr600 platform.
  • Maxime Ripard contributed a brand new subsystem to support One Wire devices. This work was initially started by Maxime years ago as part of our work on the CHIP platform from Nextthing, and was picked up by Eugen Hristev from Microchip who pushed it all the way to upstream U-Boot.

U-Boot 2019.01

  • Grégory Clement contributed the support for the Microchip/Microsemi Ocelot and Luton MIPS platforms, which includes the core code, but also a GPIO driver and a pinctrl driver.
  • Boris Brezillon contributed a number of fixes in the MTD subsystem to address various issues introduced by our work on this subsystem in the previous release.
  • Quentin Schulz contributed support for the VSC8574 and VSC8584 Ethernet PHYs from Microchip/Microsemi.
  • Miquèl Raynal improved the NAND controller driver for Marvell platforms by adding raw read support, which was used to add support for NAND chips using 2 KB pages and a ECC strength of 8 bits.

Overall contribution statistics

Overall, during this year, Bootlin engineer Miquèl Raynal contributed 90 commits, Maxime Ripard 33 commits, Boris Brezillon 24 commits, Quentin Schulz 14 commits, Grégory Clement 9 commits and Mylène Josserand 2 commits, a total of 172 commits, including some significant new features: SPI NAND support, TPMv2 support, One Wire subsystem, Ocelot and Luton platform support, ARM PL022 SPI controller support, support for additional Ethernet PHY, support for multiple environments.

We expect to continue our involvement in upstream U-Boot development, starting with a new network driver for the Microchip/Microsemi Ocelot and Luton platforms.

Detailed list of our contributions

Thomas Petazzoni

Author: Thomas Petazzoni

Thomas Petazzoni is Bootlin's co-owner and CEO. Thomas joined Bootlin in 2008 as a kernel and embedded Linux engineer, became CTO in 2013, and co-owner/CEO in 2021. More details...

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