As you may have guessed, the same personal circumstances affected this development cycle too.
Read more in the previous announcement.
What's new?
A part of the changes were made to help future proof releases, by reducing the direct involvement required from any particular individual.
See also the milestone and git history:
- https://github.com/Tow-Boot/Tow-Boot/issues?q=milestone%3A2023.07-007
- release-2022.07-006...release-2023.07-007
New boards
libreComputer-amlS905xCc(#213)orangePi-pc2(#229)libreComputer-allH3CcH5@shvetsnikita (#256)friendlyElec-nanoPiM1@shvetsnikita (#257)friendlyElec-nanoPiM1Plus@shvetsnikita (#275)
Dependencies
Some of the dependencies have been updated:
- The build tooling (Nixpkgs) has been updated.
- U-Boot 2022.07 → 2023.07
- TF-A 2.6 → 2.9
- crust-firmware 0.5 → untagged revision from 2023-02-28
Continuous Integration (#201)
With initial help from @jirutka, Tow-Boot changes are now built automatically using GitHub Actions.
These builds are the ones being uploaded to the release tag, removing one manual operation from the release workflow.
Use of a unified tree (#238)
Tow-Boot changes on top of U-Boot are now tracked as branches in a repository.
This removes all the patches from the main Tow-Boot repository. This also ensures none of the patch conflict in unintended ways, as they are now always applied.
With these changes, it is also now possible to test against a stock U-Boot using the same build tooling.
This is mainly useful to verify whether or not our changes to U-Boot are causing observed issues.
uSWID support
uSWID data is now generated and appended to out platform firmware binaries.
At this current point in time, it is not used by Tow-Boot or any of its tooling.
It does, however, hash the full build inputs information through using the $out path of the derivation as part of the tag-id value.
Board-specific improvements
All Rockchip
Rockchip devices now support powering off from U-Boot (and thus UEFI) properly.
Additional mentions
Sometimes it happens that contributions can't be used, be it because they were superseded by something else, implemented differently, or unneeded past an update.
The linked PRs should include the actual resolution in use in the comments.
Here's those that I think deserve a mention:
- @ArenM who got caught re-doing the TF-A update I already has in a branch #250
- @IreneKnapp who took an early stab at updating the base U-Boot #220
U-Boot notes
Since U-Boot changes are now independently tracked the release notes are too.
- Fix booting defconfig kernels on RK3399 @artemist (#3)[https://github.com/Tow-Boot/U-Boot/pull/3]
I'm probably missing some notable changes here.
Though I think mainly they were cleanups to either make them more upstreamable, or work better in a unified tree.
See also the tag commit for a complete overview of the changes compared to U-Boot:
