Re: Future of EBL (is there one?)

[Andrew Fish <afish@apple.com>]

> 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