[U-Boot] [PATCH 0/6] efi: make efi and bootmgr more usable

[AKASHI Takahiro <takahiro.akashi@linaro.org>]

On Wed, Oct 17, 2018 at 10:06:58AM +0200, Alexander Graf wrote:
> 
> 
> On 17.10.18 09:32, AKASHI Takahiro wrote:
> > This patch set is a collection of patches to enhance efi user interfaces
> > /commands. It will help improve user experience on efi boot and make it
> > more usable without edk2's shell utility.
> 
> That's amazing, thanks a lot :)
> 
> > Patch#1 to #4 are for efishell.
> > Patch#5 and #6 are for bootmgr.
> > 
> > Let's see how it works:
> > => efishell boot add 1 SHELL mmc 0:1 /Shell.efi ""
> > => efishell boot add 2 HELLO mmc 0:1 /hello.efi ""
> > => efishell boot dump
> 
> IMHO those 3 belong semantically to the "bootmgr" command. I can see how
> "bootefi bootmgr add 1 SHELL ..." is terrible UX. But then again it's
> not too much more to type than "efishell boot", right? ;)
> 
> So at the end of the day, these should probably be
> 
>  => bootefi bootmgr add 1 SHELL mmc 0:1 /Shell.efi ""
>  => bootefi bootmgr add 2 HELLO mmc 0:1 /hello.efi ""
>  => bootefi bootmgr dump

To be frank, I hesitate to agree with you for several reasons.
* Boot manager is a sort of boot loader application while adding/showing
  BootXXXX variables can be part of more generic system utility.
  (My interface here mimics uefi shell's bcfg command with slightly
   different syntax.)
* In future, we may want to have another sub command, "driver," to support
  driver loading, namely DriverOrder/DriverXXXX.
* Anyhow, we need another command for "setvar"( and "dumpvar").

> > Boot0001:
> > 	attributes: A-- (0x00000001)
> > 	label: SHELL
> > 	file_path: /VenHw(e61d73b9-a384-4acc-aeab-82e828f3628b)/SD(0)/SD(0)/HD(1,MBR,0x086246ba,0x800,0x40000)/\\Shell.efi
> > 	data: 
> > Boot0002:
> > 	attributes: A-- (0x00000001)
> > 	label: HELLO
> > 	file_path: /VenHw(e61d73b9-a384-4acc-aeab-82e828f3628b)/SD(0)/SD(0)/HD(1,MBR,0x086246ba,0x800,0x40000)/\\hello.efi
> > 	data: 
> > 
> > => efishell boot order 1 2
> > => efishell boot order
> 
> Same thing here :).
> 
> >  1: Boot0001: SHELL
> >  2: Boot0002: HELLO
> > 
> > => bootefi bootmgr -2
> > WARNING: booting without device tree
> > Booting: HELLO
> > ## Starting EFI application at 000000007db8b040 ...
> > Hello, world!
> > ## Application terminated, r = 0
> > 
> > => efishell setvar PlatformLang en        <--- important!
> 
> That one is slightly more complicated. How about we introduce a -e flag
> to all the env operations? Then this would become
> 
>  => setenv -e PlatformLang en
> 
> and you could print only EFI variables using
> 
>  => printenv -e
> 
> maybe one day we could then also just implement partial variable storage
> for UEFI variables:
> 
>  => saveenv -e
> 
> which we could then reuse in the ExitBootServices() call to persist EFI
> variables?

I didn't get your point. Can you please elaborate it?

> > => efishell bootmgr -1 or efishell bootmgr
> > 
> >    (shell ...)
> > 
> > # The only drawback is that it can be confusing to type
> >   "bootefi ..." and "efi(shell) boot ..." :)
> 
> Yes :).

The compromise I can imagine is that efishell be also aliased
to bootefi so that we can do:
 => efi(shell) boot add 1 ...
 => efi(shell) bootmgr -1 ( in my current syntax)
Yet we still maintain an old/boot*-style interface:
 => bootefi bootmgr or <appl addr>

Thanks,
-Takahiro Akashi

> 
> Alex