U-Boot 2020.10 Released With Many Improvements
While not talked about as much as GRUB, U-Boot continues quite successfully in 2020 with appearing on hardware from Chromebooks and plenty of network devices to SpaceX rockets at the opposite end. With U-Boot 2020.10 there are a plethora of changes as usual compared to the previous release, v2020.07.
In digging through all the changes over the past three months, some of the U-Boot 2020.10 highlights include:
- Support for PCI and xHCI with the Raspberry Pi 4 along with USB keyboard support.
- Support for U-Boot to be run as a bootloader for the Xen virtual machine.
- Support was added for the SquashFS file-system. Later work this cycle then introduced LZO and zSTD decompression within the SquashFS code and other improvements.
- Support for the Arm Total Compute platform.
- Support for Octeon TX2 SoC platforms.
- Initial platform support for hardware from Arm SoC vendor Nexell.
- Many U-Boot x86 improvements, including a generic driver to generate ACPI information for I2C devices and support for using a copy frame-buffer.
- Support for updating U-Boot on the Intel Edison using xFSTK.
- Generic UDP protocol framework added to the network code.
- ROCK PI 4A/4B/4C board support, ODROID Go2, ODROID C4, ODROID-N2, and other boards.
- AT91 CPU driver added.
- Support for running U-Boot and booting into a Chrome OS image but without verified boot. Also various fixes/improvements for different Chromebooks.
- A number of different SiFive RISC-V improvements, including restored support for the HiFive Unleashed to be able to boot.
The brief release announcement for U-Boot 2020.10 can be read on the project's mailing list.
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