Linux 5.8 Seeing The Preliminary Changes Ahead Of RISC-V EFI Support

One of the areas being worked on upstream recently for the RISC-V architecture's Linux kernel support is EFI handling. The preliminary work for supporting EFI on RISC-V is set to land for the Linux 5.8 kernel.

In recent months the Linux EFI code has been going through a spring cleaning of sorts with the preparations towards RISC-V enablement. The initial preparations for RISC-V EFI support have been sent in as part of EFI-next code ultimately destined for Linux 5.8.

Among those changes are unifying EFI call wrappers for non-x86, various code changes to improve portability / architecture agnostic, and other code enhancements. This is just the preliminary work with the actual RISC-V EFI support left yet to land.

Also with these EFI changes in general for Linux 5.8 is support for being able to specify the resolution and depth via the command-line for the EFI graphics output protocol code. Specifying of the display resolution for EFI GOP can be done using the video=efifb:[xres]:[yres]. The video=efifb:auto option is there for retaining the automatically picked best (highest) resolution.

The list of EFI material queued so far for EFI-Next ahead of the Linux 5.8 cycle this summer can be found via LKML.org.