On Tue, Jul 06, 2021 at 05:05:19PM -0600, Simon Glass wrote: > Hi, > > At present U-Boot avoids the concept of 'opening' a file. Being in a > bootloader environment, it is normally better to take the action > immediately and avoid any caching, for example, since there is no > background task to clean up afterwards. > > Having said that, the concept of a file is quite useful, for example > to write the output of a command to a file, or to open a file and read > it a line at a time. > > Another case has come to light in that EFI wants to access files using > a file handle. This currently uses parallel data structures and does > not map very well in U-Boot. > > Finally, partitions has a similar issue, where defining them as a > device can have benefits, e.g. to specify the device to use directly, > rather than with the 'type dev:part' approach, perhaps providing them > in the devicetree, etc. > > For the above reasons, I propose that we implement, as an option, > support for files and partitions within driver model.
+1 # Nobody has commented yet :) Regarding a "file (or file descriptor)", we have already implemented the same concept in efi_loader. So technically, it won't be a hard-work. Regarding "partitions as udevice," I have posted an experimental patch [1]. So it must also be feasible. One of my concerns is what benefit end users may enjoy. -Takahiro Akashi [1] https://lists.denx.de/pipermail/u-boot/2019-February/357937.html https://lists.denx.de/pipermail/u-boot/2019-February/357934.html > Regards, > Simon