A Specification Is Being Discussed For Passing Firmware/Bootloader Logs To The OS

[bavay]

That would be so great for arm boards booting off u-boot. Currently, the only solution to capture the details of what u-boot did (ie how complete u-boot support is for a specific board, which components have been initialized, how RAM has been initialized, etc) is to connect a serial console. Being able to just query the kernel to get these logs would be so much easier!

[chithanh]

Doesn't every modern Intel and AMD processor have a networking capable Management Engine/PSP/etc. that could capture the firmware log and could be queried via SNMP or somesuch? That is how it is already done with IPMI and similar management hardware.

Anyway, AFAIR everything (including user defined strings which may need logging) in UEFI is UCS-2 encoded, an encoding that is somewhat popular in the Windows world but avoided by almost everyone else for good reason. I have a bad feeling about how logging non-ASCII characters is going to happen...

[discordian]

That would be so great for arm boards booting off u-boot. Currently, the only solution to capture the details of what u-boot did (ie how complete u-boot support is for a specific board, which components have been initialized, how RAM has been initialized, etc) is to connect a serial console. Being able to just query the kernel to get these logs would be so much easier!

U-Boot can write to ext4, so what's new?
if your bootloader fails to init your hardware, then it's unlikely that a spec that depends on said init will help.