Future of EBL (is there one?)

Future of EBL (is there one?)

[Leif Lindholm]

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

Re: Future of EBL (is there one?)

[Andrew Fish]

> On Apr 11, 2017, at 2:44 AM, Leif Lindholm <leif.lindholm@linaro.org> wrote:
> 
> 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.
> 

Leif,

I wrote the original code something like 10 years ago. The intent was a proof of concept that EFI could scale down to embedded systems and be a BSD licensed alternative to U-Boot. I was trying to show that implementation != architecture and a lot of edk2 projects were large but they did not have to be. 

I was kind of surprised how popular it was and how many products actually shipped with it. I'm fine with deprecating the EBL if it makes sense. 

Thanks,

Andrew Fish

> 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

Re: Future of EBL (is there one?)

[Leif Lindholm]

Hi Andrew,

On Tue, Apr 11, 2017 at 07:57:13AM -0700, Andrew Fish wrote:
> > On Apr 11, 2017, at 2:44 AM, Leif Lindholm <leif.lindholm@linaro.org> wrote:
> > 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.
> > 
> 
> Leif,
> 
> I wrote the original code something like 10 years ago. The intent
> was a proof of concept that EFI could scale down to embedded systems
> and be a BSD licensed alternative to U-Boot. I was trying to show
> that implementation != architecture and a lot of edk2 projects were
> large but they did not have to be.
> 
> I was kind of surprised how popular it was and how many products
> actually shipped with it. I'm fine with deprecating the EBL if it
> makes sense.

Thanks.

For what it's worth - I think it's worth revisiting that in the
future, combined for lightweight ARM and x86 platforms (and maybe
RISC-V), and through the magic of git it will be easy to resurrect at
that point.

For now, I mainly want to stop new platform ports being posted with both
EBL and UEFI Shell. (And I've not seen any using EBL for a good reason
in a long time.)

Regards,

Leif.

> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Andrew Fish
> 
> > 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
>