Future of EBL (is there one?)

[Leif Lindholm <leif.lindholm@linaro.org>]

Hi all,

This email was brought about by Ard's spring cleaning.

EBL (EmbeddedPkg/Ebl/) is (to the best of my understanding) a sort of
lightweight alternative to UEFI Shell, especially for serial console
only embedded devices.

Probably because this was included in some existing ARM platforms in
the past, and its monolithic design made it more familiar to embedded
firmware developers to plug new commands into than the (extremely
modular) Shell, this has now made it into several
definitely-not-embedded platform ports.

In order to reduce the risk of this happening again, I would like to
consider the option of deleting EBL.

Do we still have a need for EBL in EDK2?
If so, can someone give a descriptive mission statement for it? What
is it intended for, and what does it provide over the alternatives?

For those on cc who have included it in platform ports (in
OpenPlatformPkg), can you explain why?

Evan - is EBL of any interest to your team?

Regards,

Leif