Re: [PATCH v4 00/11] boot: Support priority for global bootmeths

[Tom Rini <trini@konsulko.com>]

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On Wed, Oct 15, 2025 at 04:44:03PM +0100, Simon Glass wrote:

> At present global bootmeths always run first, before all other
> bootmeths. Optimisations in the code take advantage of this, putting
> them at the end, so they can be used once and then forgotten.
> 
> In some cases it is useful to run global bootmeths later in the boot.
> For example, the EFI-bootmgr bootmeth may itself scan devices and the
> network, so running it first can hold up the boot significantly for
> boards not actually relying on EFI-bootmgr to boot.
> 
> This series introduces a new field in global bootmeths which indicates
> the priority, using the same scheme as is used with bootdev hunters.
> Thus it is possible to insert the EFI-bootmgr bootmeth just before the
> hunter for network bootdevs is invoked.
> 
> Despite the simplicity of the concept and the relatively small series,
> this is a fairly significant enhancement. It is also quite tricky to
> implement, largely due to the way the original code was written, with
> global bootmeths being a small, size-optimised add-on to the original
> bootstd implementation.
> 
> For now we only allow each global bootmeth to run at most once, but this
> implementation is written in a way that we could relax that if needed.
> Then the bootmeth itself could decide whether to run at any particular
> point in the bootflow iteration.
> 
> Size growth is about 390 bytes on Thumb2 (e.g. firefly-rk3288) if
> CONFIG_BOOTMETH_GLOBAL is enabled, which it normally is. With that
> disabled (which saves about 4K on the same platform), there is no
> growth.
> 
> Changes in v4:
> - Reword the commit message as Tom suggested
> - Drop call to bootflow_show()
> - Rebase on top of -master

Aside from my comment on the first patch, the big thing is if this
addresses the problems Andre reported or not. This is likely the right
step forward regardless, but might not be everything needed.

-- 
Tom

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