U-Boot Finally Lands HTTP & TCP Support For Downloading Images

The U-Boot open-source bootloader that is widely used for embedded devices has finally landed support for HTTP and TCP along with a basic "wget" implementation for downloading images via HTTP/TCP.

The U-Boot bootloader to this point has supported file transfers via tftp or NFS using UDP. However, thanks to the lengthy work by Linaro, there is now TCP protocol support and in turn finally the ability to be able to download images via HTTP.

After twenty rounds of revisions, the patches implementing TCP support for U-Boot's network code has been merged along with adding a basic wget application. U-Boot's wget allows downloading a file from an HTTP server over TCP to a specified memory address. This wget implementation is quite simple and currently only supports HTTP servers on port 80 -- and also no support (yet) for HTTPS.

Yes, as we close out 2022, U-Boot can finally download a kernel or other files from HTTP servers rather than resorting to NFS or TFTP for remotely loading. This should hopefully ease some U-Boot embedded device deployments moving forward. This TCP/HTTP and wget support for U-Boot has been in the works via patches now for more than a half-decade.

As of Monday the patches are now merged in U-Boot.