Wolfgang Denk, creator of the U-Boot bootloader, has died | Hacker News Reader

Wolfgang Denk, creator of the U-Boot bootloader, has died

lists.denx.de

274 pointsgdgghhhhh24 comments

There are some tributes on LWN: https://lwn.net/Articles/912052/

Would also vote for the black banner treatment, U-Boot is pervasive. It runs on satellites in space, it runs on the phones in our pockets: https://lists.denx.de/pipermail/u-boot/2006-December/018577....

He was also a great supporter of Xenomai: https://lore.kernel.org/xenomai/eca5db9d-5e39-672a-e190-1c8e...

https://lore.kernel.org/xenomai/87v8oa60bx.fsf@xenomai.org/T...

Wow, I didn't even know about this. It's a cool project!

We use u-boot at work, in completely uninteresting places. You don't think about it, it just is. Curl is probably a good equivalence - its pervasiveness is more impressive than its extremes.

Often someone's obituary gets posted on HN who was well known in some parts of the IT community, but not well known enough to have a Wikipedia page or a bio somewhere.

One thing that I usually want to know (and that's usually hard to find), and it's not out of morbid curiosity, is how old the person was and whether their death was sudden and tragic or more or less natural and expected.

I know the loss hurts in either case, but it's somehow much more comforting knowing that e.g. an 82 year-old kernel dev demi-god grandpa died in his sleep, having lived a long, fruitful life, than that some game dev prodigy in her late twenties got hit by a drunk driver.

RIP Wolfgang, I read a bit about your work and it sounds like you did enough good for several lives.

He was employed 25 years ago, at least long enough to be senior to the author of this post, so that puts a lower bound of 50 (which at least matches with how he looks in his profile on his company's about section).

Still unfortunate if he's just 50, however.

He looked like 55 +/-5 in 2013 https://www.linux.com/news/u-boot-creator-wolfgang-denk-grea...

I have used U-Boot in many projects and my current one uses it, too.

Almost every embedded Linux system, especially on ARM platforms, uses u-boot to start up. And that includes Android.

It's everywhere and it's all invisible to you. But it's a crucial piece of code.

He's a true OpenSource propagator, and a professional. In growing world of embedded systems, the importance of U-Boot is hard to overestimate. What a loss!

Very true, I have seen many people who won't go nearly as far in their professional life for supporting OSS, including myself. And U-boot is just incredible to say the least.

i vote the man deserves a black banner.

Sad day.

I used ppcboot at musenki 20 years ago (2001-2002) on a set of MPC 824x boards.

Wolfgang was always helpful.

Support was removed in 2014 https://lists.denx.de/pipermail/u-boot/2014-December/198820....

I still remember the first time when I collaborated with Wolfgang. He was such a kind and open minded person with a such a great value system.

Together with the amazing Denx crew we upstreamed all our custom CPU modules to the U-Boot source code. We also collaborated on the 2038 support within glibc, Linux Kernel and of course U-Boot.

I still remember when I did a demo of GitLab and Travis CI to Wolfgang and of course we also exchanged on personal topics such as nice restaurants in Usedom.

Once I explained Wolfgang about the pain of license compliance and shared the idea to use SPDX-License-Identifier. He agreed on solving this at the source code level like engineers would do and he made https://source.denx.de/u-boot/u-boot/-/commit/eca3aeb352c964... in 2013. Nowadays, this ended up within Linux Kernel and many other widely used open source projects.

He was a real pioneer and I'm so sad he passed away. I will always remember and wish all the best to family and friends!

Agree with others, black banner appropriate.

What happens to U-Boot now? Will it continue to live on, or will it be replaced by something else from another vendor?

I doubt anything changes. It's open source under the GPL2 and is used by everyone under the sun so there is plenty of motivation to maintain it.

I believe the project is headed by Tom Rini.

I don't think U-Boot is anywhere near having a bus factor of one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor

Many thanks for standing strong for and with Open Source, Rest in Peace, dear sir. :)

He's the person who threw the first stone in making ARM firmware and hardware more accessible, RIP.

U-boot, how I got my career start with embedded Xilinx FPGA ARM processor.

Thank you, Wolfgang, for all your inputs in the mastery of memory management.

RIP ,no match to it ,its used everywhere

Wow RIP, u-boot is fantastic and it's a real loss to have its creator gone.

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