On 18/05/2026 10:48, Vincent Stehlé wrote:
On Tue, May 12, 2026 at 09:05:29PM +0200, Heinrich Schuchardt wrote:
Did you find any real use for HII protocols in U-Boot except for running the
SCT?
Are HII based EFI applications a thing?
Hi Heinrich,
A fair question indeed, as the HII protocols do not seem to be used that much in
practice.
The UEFI Shell seems to be using them, though, which should be a sufficient
reason to support them, I think.
Those protocols are used as well a little in systemd-boot and iPXE for example,
but as far as I can tell, they are not used at all in Shim, GRUB, Linux, Xen,
the BSDs or Android GBL.
For the record: iPXE has zero interest in almost all of the HII
protocols. We provide an HII interface to allow external utilities to
read and modify iPXE settings, but I don't believe anything actually
uses this interface. (There are some comments about the HII config
protocols at
https://github.com/ipxe/ipxe/blob/ca85200809eb0bf5571869264cb2bf7f0548180a/src/interface/efi/efi_snp_hii.c#L30-L49)
The only use case that iPXE itself has for any part of HII is the
EFI_HII_FONT_PROTOCOL, which we use to obtain font glyphs in the cases
when we are drawing our own framebuffer console instead of using ConOut.
Thanks,
Michael
