HTTP now supported in U-Boot

linaro.org

25 points·todsacerdoti··6 comments

Nice! I have a few devices (from Pine64) that boot using u-boot, might be useful one day.

> That limitation meant that downloading images or files from the network could only use protocols that were based on UDP, for example Trivial File Transfer Protocol (TFTP) and Network File System (NFS)

PXE as always been a bit annoying for my use case. PCs have had UEFI for a long time now, UEFIs are complete OSes, but if I want to install an OS, a one shot situation, PXE feels overkill, with the need to fiddle with DHCP. It'd be great if I could just serve the image of the installer over HTTP, I'd be okay with typing the ip address of the HTTP server. If seems (almost) everything to provide this feature is there, it's just the last bits missing.

The funny thing is that UEFI supports HTTP boot since 2.6 (i.e. since 2016), it is included in Tianocore, with DNS and TLS support, but for some reason, many vendors removed it from their implementations. I never understood why.

I thought I read somewhere that HTTP/3 can use UDP now. Thought I'm not sure if it can purely use UDP or if it needs to be bootstrapped by a TCP connection first.

It would be handy if the HTTP standard had some support for a minimal UDP connection for resource constrained webservers.

HTTP/3 uses QUIC, which mandates TLS. This, and the general protocol specification which requires peers to store very detailed state about every packet sent, make it much more resource intensive than HTTP/1.1 over TCP.

Source: I implemented HTTP/3 support for a major cloud provider

Whow, easier backdoors for free. Now even remotely. And even without TLS, so anybody can mess with it.

Why do you assume this?

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