To quote the author:
The bootflow feature provide a built-in way for U-Boot to automatically
boot an Operating System without custom scripting and other customisation.
This is called 'standard boot' since it provides a standard way for
U-Boot to boot a distro, without scripting.
It introduces the following concepts:
- bootdev - a device which can hold a distro
- bootmeth - a method to scan a bootdev to find bootflows (owned by
U-Boot)
- bootflow - a description of how to boot (owned by the distro)
This series provides an implementation of these, enabled to scan for
bootflows from MMC, USB and Ethernet. It supports the existing distro
boot as well as the EFI loader flow (bootefi/bootmgr). It works
similiarly to the existing script-based approach, but is native to
U-Boot.
With this we can boot on a Raspberry Pi 3 with just one command:
bootflow scan -lb
which means to scan, listing (-l) each bootflow and trying to boot each
one (-b). The final patch shows this.
With a standard way to identify boot devices, booting become easier. It
also should be possible to support U-Boot scripts, for backwards
compatibility only.
...
The design is described in these two documents:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ggW0KJpUOR__vBkj3l61L2dav4ZkNC12/view?usp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kTrflO9vvGlKp-ZH_jlgb9TY3WYG6FF9/view?usp=sharing
This patch series adds support for ZFS listing and load to u-boot. To Enable zfs ls and load commands, modify the board specific config file with #define CONFIG_CMD_ZFS Steps to test: 1. After applying the patch, zfs specific commands can be seen in the boot loader prompt using UBOOT #help zfsload- load binary file from a ZFS file system zfsls - list files in a directory (default /) 2. To list the files in zfs pool, device or partition, execute zfsls <interface> <dev[:part]> [POOL/@/dir/file] For example: UBOOT #zfsls mmc 0:5 /rpool/@/usr/bin/ 3. To read and load a file from an ZFS formatted partition to RAM, execute zfsload <interface> <dev[:part]> [addr] [filename] [bytes] For example: UBOOT #zfsload mmc 2:2 0x30007fc0 /rpool/@/boot/uImage References : -- ZFS GRUB sources from Solaris GRUB-0.97 -- GRUB Bazaar repository Jorgen Lundman <lundman at lundman.net> 2012.