The Deinde Concept Tree is where a number of firmware features are developed ahead of mainline U‑Boot. The items below are currently only in the Concept Tree — they have not yet landed in mainline. The hope is that much of this work will make its way upstream over time; for now, this page tracks what is still exclusive to the tree.
EFI application
Mainline U‑Boot has only a primitive, x86‑only EFI app. The Concept Tree has a full-featured EFI application: it runs on x86, ARM and RISC‑V, drives video output and keyboard/mouse input, and can boot an operating system (including under a Shim environment). details »
Storage & filesystems
A driver-model layer for files and directories (fs, file and dir uclasses) that the filesystems below build on. details »
A new ext4 implementation ported directly from the Linux kernel, for more robust handling of real-world filesystems. details »
Mount a directory shared from the host straight into U‑Boot over virtio — handy for emulation and development. details »
Unlock LUKS1 and LUKSv2 partitions (including AES‑XTS) to boot from encrypted storage. details »
Use a Tillitis TKey hardware security key to unlock an encrypted disk at boot. details »
Booting & UI
An interactive boot controller built on standard boot, with an on-screen, mouse-aware menu. details »
A mouse uclass with USB, EFI and sandbox drivers, plus an on-screen pointer — usable in the boot menu and the EFI app. details »
Booting improvements
A standard-boot bootmeth that boots an Allwinner (sunxi) board over the USB FEL protocol. details »
editenv -e edits an environment variable interactively with an on-screen expo, instead of a plain text prompt. details »
The PXE/extlinux parser is split into separate load and setup phases with a clean three-phase API (and memory-leak fixes), plus a standalone parser module. details »
Ongoing cleanup of the boot path: FIT printing moved to its own file, the final pre-boot steps factored into one function, and reduced reliance on CMDLINE and kernel_addr_r. details »
U‑Boot’s EFI loader installs and boots Windows 10 and Windows 11 on qemu‑x86_64, with no bypasses: Windows 11’s TPM 2.0 check passes through U‑Boot’s TCG2 protocol, boot entries persist in variable flash and secure boot works. Lab tests keep it working. details »
Windows 11 Arm64 boots to the desktop with U‑Boot as the firmware on QEMU’s virt machine, under TCG or KVM. The fixes on the way (ACPI table space, virtio teardown, the devicetree reservation) help every OS, not just Windows. details »
Running U-Boot beyond the board
Build U‑Boot as a shared library and call it from your own programs — in C or Rust. details »
Emulation & testing
A fully-functional virtio emulator so virtio devices (block, virtio‑fs) can be developed and tested with no hardware — part of broader QEMU/QFW emulation improvements. details »
Developer tools
Page through long command output instead of watching it scroll off the top of the screen. details »
A refreshed dlmalloc (2.8.6) plus heap-debugging commands and mcheck caller tracking for hunting memory bugs. details »
Produce a runtime backtrace on demand to help debug what U‑Boot is doing. details »
A source-code analysis tool for tracking and categorising the codebase. details »
Recently landed in mainline: Boot Loader Spec (BLS) bootmeth. 🎉
This list is derived from the tree’s merge requests and verified against mainline U‑Boot (each feature’s source files are checked against u‑boot/master and u‑boot/next). See also the Upstream status dashboard. Last reviewed 2 November 2026.