On 12/13/22 16:41, Hector Palacios wrote:
Hi Max,

On 12/13/22 13:24, Max van den Biggelaar wrote:
Hi,

I have a question regarding the U-Boot exit command. We are currently using mainline U-Boot 2022.04 version to provide our embedded systems with a bootloader image. To start our firmware via U-Boot environment, we use a bootscript to start our firmware. However, when we tried to exit a bootscript with the exit command, the bootscript was never exited.

After debugging to investigate the problem, we found this commit (https://github.com/u-boot/u-boot/commit/8c4e3b79bd0bb76eea16869e9666e19047c0d005) in mainline U-Boot:
cmd: exit: Fix return value


In case exit is called in a script without parameter, the command
returns -2 ; in case exit is called with a numerical parameter,
the command returns -2 and lower. This leads to the following problem:
=> setenv foo 'echo bar ; exit 1' ; run foo ; echo $?
bar
0
=> setenv foo 'echo bar ; exit 0' ; run foo ; echo $?
bar
0
=> setenv foo 'echo bar ; exit -2' ; run foo ; echo $?
bar
0
That is, no matter what the 'exit' command argument is, the return
value is always 0 and so it is not possible to use script return
value in subsequent tests.

Fix this and simplify the exit command such that if exit is called with
no argument, the command returns 0, just like 'true' in cmd/test.c. In
case the command is called with any argument that is positive integer,
the argument is set as return value.
=> setenv foo 'echo bar ; exit 1' ; run foo ; echo $?
bar
1
=> setenv foo 'echo bar ; exit 0' ; run foo ; echo $?
bar
0
=> setenv foo 'echo bar ; exit -2' ; run foo ; echo $?
bar
0

Note that this does change ABI established in 2004 , although it is
unclear whether that ABI was originally OK or not.

Fixes: c26e454<https://github.com/u-boot/u-boot/commit/c26e454dfc6650428854fa2db3b1ed7f19e0ba0e>
Signed-off-by: Marek Vasut <ma...@denx.de>
Cc: Pantelis Antoniou <pantelis.anton...@konsulko.com>
Cc: Tom Rini <tr...@konsulko.com>

This commit does solve the problem of returning the correct value given to the exit command, but this breaks the following source code in common/cli_hush.c:
https://github.com/u-boot/u-boot/blob/master/common/cli_hush.c#L3207

In the previous versions of U-Boot, such as 2020.04, the exit command returned -2, which was expected of the exit command API. However, after the patch above to fix the return value, -2 was never returned and the functionality to exit a bootscript or mainline U-Boot shell is not supported anymore. Thus, by the patch above the return value is fixed, but the functionality of the exit command is broken.

My question is if the functionality of this patch is fully tested/qualified to push in mainline U-Boot source code? And if so, is the functionality of the exit command also going to be fixed so that in future U-Boot source code releases bootscripts can be exited with this command?

I believe Marek's commit must be reverted as having 'exit' return a code other than 0 (success) or 1 (error) was never part of U-Boot. I don't know if reverting may break newer scripts, but now many scripts are broken because 'exit' does not currently work.

Anyway, Marek wanted to give it a second thought. See https://www.mail-archive.com/u-boot%40lists.denx.de/msg456830.html

Right, reverting the aforementioned commit breaks exit return value handling. Special-casing 'exit' in shell with strcmp is not the right approach, the exit behavior clearly needs closer look. I just haven't had time to do that yet and reply to Hector.

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