Re: Future of EBL (is there one?)

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

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
>