U-Boot Has Been Seeing Better x86 Support, EFI Improvements

Google's Simon Glass who is part of the Chromium / Chrome OS team presented at this week's Embedded Linux Conference in San Diego on U-Boot.

U-Boot continues making good progress particularly on the embedded front for where this bootloader is most well known, but it's also been seeing increasing x86 support. Currently U-Boot supports around 10 different Intel SoCs and can handle booting from Coreboot on most boards. Intel Apollolake support is forthcoming to U-Boot. Additionally, FSP2 support for the newer version of Intel's firmware support package is being worked on for U-Boot. Also new on U-Boot's x86 front is slimbootloader support.

Outside of x86, U-Boot has seen continued progress on its ability for handling EFI programs and replacing UEFI for many use-cases, U-Boot can also act as an EFI payload itself.

Those interested in finding out more about U-Boot's happenings in 2019 and what is possibly on the horizon can see this PDF slide deck from Simon Glass' ELC presentation.