U-Boot 2020.10 Released With Many Improvements

Written by Michael Larabel in Free Software on 6 October 2020 at 12:00 AM EDT. 8 Comments
FREE SOFTWARE
U-Boot 2020.10 released on Monday as the latest quarterly feature update to this open-source bootloader popular with embedded devices.

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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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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