Re: u-boot vs. uefi as boot loaders on ARM

[Julien Grall <julien@xxxxxxx>]

On 15/08/2020 21:43, Roman Shaposhnik wrote:
> Hi!
Hi,

> with the recent excellent work by Anastasiia committed to the u-boot's
> main line, we now have two different ways of bringing ARM DomUs.
>
> Is there any chance someone can educate the general public on pros
> and cons of both approaches?
>
> In Project EVE we're still using uefi on ARM (to stay closer to the more
> "ARM in the cloud" use case) but perhaps the situation now is more
> nuanced?
UEFI is just standard, so I am guessing you are referring to 
Tianocore/EDK2. am I correct?
Recent version of U-boot are also able to partially UEFI. This means you 
could easily use GRUB with U-boot.
From my understanding, U-boot is just a bootloader. Therefore it will 
not provide runtime services (such as date & time). Furthermore, the 
interface is less user friendly, you will have to know the memory layout 
in order to load binaries.
On the other hand, Tianocore/EDK2 is very similar to what non-embedded 
may be used to. It will not require you to know your memory layout. But 
this comes at the cost of a more complex bootloader to debug.
Cheers,

--
Julien Grall