The 2013.01 release of the popular U-Boot bootloader has been published by Tom Rini, the interim maintainer. The U-Boot developers unfortunately don’t really keep a log of the major changes, so it’s not really easy to figure out the big picture, differentiate the big interesting changes from the usual flow of bug fixes.
A quick inspection of the git commit log since the 2012.10 release shows more than 1200 commits, a strong activity. Amongst those commits, the things that seem to be the most important changes are:
- A big cleanup of the serial drivers and serial infrastructure done by Marek Vasut, quite possibly as part of his work towards bringing a proper Device Model in U-Boot
- The support for a number of boards has been removed, a few PowerPC boards and ARM boards. The open-source world generally has very high standards in terms of preserving support for old platforms during a long time, but after too much time, supporting old platforms often gets into the way of maintainability of the code. So seeing a project removing support for old platforms from time to time is a good sign.
- The support for a number of boards has been added: eco5pk board (TI AM35xx based), the Nokia N900 (OMAP3 based), the Colibri board (NVidia Tegra 2 based), several i.MX6 based boards and the Freescale MCF54418TWR ColdFire development board.
- The SPL framework (for small first stage bootloaders) has been ported to PowerPC, and also to the ARM1136 part of the U-Boot code base.
- Support for new PowerPC SoCs has been added: Freescale B4860, T4240, P5040, etc.
- Addition of a NAND torture command, that tests intensively a NAND block to find if it is really usable or not.
- Addition of a
bootstagecommand, which displays the results collected by the bootstage feature, which measures the timing of the different steps of U-Boot execution. A feature definitely useful for those seeking improvements in boot time. - Interestingly, support for DocBook based documentation as been added, modeled after what the Linux kernel is doing. Some documentation has been added.
- Many sparse fixes have been made, with the goal of generalizing sparse usage in U-Boot, it seems.
- Also worth noting, a large number of updates in the x86 support, the AHCI support and the i.MX family of SoCs
See the U-Boot Git repository for more details, and to fetch the latest source code.
