On Thu, Jun 4, 2026 at 9:21 PM Tom Rini <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Thu, Jun 04, 2026 at 09:16:58PM +0400, Alexey Charkov wrote: > > On Thu, Jun 4, 2026 at 8:05 PM Tom Rini <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > > > On Thu, Jun 04, 2026 at 07:31:05PM +0400, Alexey Charkov wrote: > > > > > > > Add support for the Boot Loader Specification (BLS) type 1 boot entries, > > > > as generated by default by systemd's kernel-install when loader=bls. > > > > > > > > Given that the format of BLS entries is pretty much the same as > > > > PXElinux, > > > > reuse the existing library for the parsing logic. > > > > > > > > BLS type 2 entries are out of scope, as they are effectively just EFI > > > > applications and should be booted as such. > > > > > > > > This implementation is also only allowing a single top-sorting entry to > > > > boot, as the standard boot infrastruture currently doesn't support > > > > multiple entries per partition-bootmeth tuple. I have a proposed > > > > extension > > > > to enable that and will post it separately as RFC - that enables the use > > > > of `bootflow menu` to select the kernel to boot without jumping through > > > > several menus with different behavior as is currently required with > > > > extlinux.conf. > > > > > > > > Signed-off-by: Alexey Charkov <[email protected]> > > > > > > This is good to see, thanks for posting it. One concern I have is that > > > out of 1529 platforms, this would be enabled on 1392 of them. And the > > > size growth is around 1.5 kilobytes. Is there some smaller percentage of > > > platforms this should be "default y" for ? Or is the expectation that > > > something like Debian will be configuring for this moving forward, so > > > yes even something like PowerPC platforms be using this? Thanks! > > > > Well this is the config format that systemd's kernel-install produces > > out of the box, and it doesn't require EFI support unlike UKI (a.k.a. > > BLS type 2). So one could argue that any system shipping with systemd > > benefits directly. In my view, that makes it more accessible for end > > users than e.g. bootmeth_extlinux, which is also "default y" but I > > could only find a suitable config generator for it with device tree > > support in Debian (not in Fedora, nor in Gentoo out of my extremely > > representative sample of N=3 distros). > > > > Happy to make it conditional on whatever platforms find this helpful > > though, or drop "default y" altogether. I personally only care about > > ARM, and Rockchip in particular :) > > Right. What I'm asking is, do you know how many distros are planning to > adopt BLS type 1 support by default? And since you're on Rockchip, why > not just use BLS type 2?
I've only seen Fedora use it by default, but I'm not that much of a distro connoisseur. There might be more, or there might not. BLS type 2 didn't work for me last time I tried it because it seemingly wanted to bake the DTB into the UKI and couldn't handle DT overlays, which made booting different boards with the same kernel binary a pain. BLS type 1 didn't have those issues, and a concise plaintext config has its (subjective) appeal over yet-another-packed-binary-format. Best regards, Alexey
