EFI payload / application support

Quoted 18 lines · Alexander Graf

This is my Christmas present for my openSUSE friends :).

U-Boot is a great project for embedded devices. However, convincing everyone involved that only for "a few oddball ARM devices" we need to support different configuration formats from grub2 when all other platforms (PPC, System Z, x86) are standardized on a single format is a nightmare.

So we started to explore alternatives. At first, people tried to get grub2 running using the u-boot api interface. However, FWIW that one doesn't support relocations, so you need to know where to link grub2 to at compile time. It also seems to be broken more often than not. And on top of it all, it's a one-off interface, so yet another thing to maintain.

That led to a nifty idea. What if we can just implement the EFI application protocol on top of U-Boot? Then we could compile a single grub2 binary for uEFI based systems and U-Boot based systems and as soon as that one's loaded, everything looks and feels (almost) the same.

Quoted 1 line

This patch set is the result of pursuing this endeavor.

So, I owe the whole codebase a real review. My very quick question however is, aside from what you had to borrow from wine, can you license everything else as GPL v2 or later rather than LGPL?