Re: U-Boot Concept Tree Proposal

[Tom Rini <trini@konsulko.com>]

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On Fri, Jun 26, 2026 at 08:07:16PM +0200, Quentin Schulz wrote:

[snip]
> I'll finish that my gut feeling (shared with some of my current and former
> colleagues) is that U-Boot is disappointingly unstable. Unlike the Linux
> kernel, U-Boot suffers from fewer eyes looking at code, fewer people
> developing it, fewer people testing master or even any recent release (the
> number of reports we have for bugs on releases from years ago...), and lack
> of proper and extensive CI test infrastructure (and if we have some, it's
> heavily centralized into a handful of people's offices). I loathe every time
> I need to update U-Boot because I don't know what I'll have to debug for
> days or if I really do test everything there's to test (is it my fault for
> not keeping up with master, yes, but I shouldn't feel this way).
> So I really think we could have much more confidence in code being merged if
> we had more testing, possibly on real hardware, possibly by companies
> offering to do some proper CI (e.g. like Intel is doing with Yocto, spending
> days testing release candidates before the project tags a release). Maybe
> with distros slowly adopting Aarch64 and U-Boot with it we'll have more
> coverage. I know you've worked on labgrid support for U-Boot and you have
> some merge request(s) still open there but it seems you're hitting the same
> wall there you're hitting here.

Thanks for the feedback here. I've been staying out of this general
thread as I believe my thoughts are well known already.

For the specific topic here, part of it comes down I believe to a very
uneven level of testing. Both AMD/Xilinx and TI (and in turn, a number
of their vendors) have labs and run tests with a good deal of frequency.
I suspect NXP has some testing going on too, and this isn't an intended
as an exhaustive list. But others really are very much volunteer lead
and getting a reliable and remote lab setup really is a lot of work, so
no one has done it. Rockchip is an unfortunate example here that I know
you run in to. I have an rk3399 I've been trying to find time and space
to get up in the sage lab, for example, but it's still just not there.

Some of this in turn has been held back by a historical lack of a legal
entity for companies to work with that represents the project. We have
part of this solved now, so I am hoping we can make progress in the
future, once we fully finish migrating to community owned
infrastructure. Other parts of it indeed might shake out as part of more
broad usage of at least arm64 platforms in general Linux distributions.

-- 
Tom

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