Hi Johannes, On Sun, 14 Jun 2026 at 19:50, Johannes Krottmayer <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hello U-Boot list members! > > I have a question about the 'bootelf' command. Use U-Boot > as loader for my bare-metal projects, but noticed maybe an > issue when trying to execute an ELF binary. > > I'm not really sure whether this is intentional or this is > an issue. Wasted a lot of time for trying to run a simple > 'Hello World" program on RISC-V (both QEMU and real > hardware). Then I looked into the source code from > the command and noticed that currently the environment > variable 'autostart' must be set, if not the command > simple returns without any error or warning message: > > Source: lib/elf.c:bootelf(): > > --- > if (!flags.autostart) > return 0; > --- > > Please can somebody clarify why 'autostart' must > be set to successful use the command 'bootelf'? > > Thanks in advance!
Hmm, yes. The real defects are that it's silent and returns success when it declines to run. It's also undocumented in bootelf.rst I think it should run if 'autoboot' is unset - that's how bootm works with ELF files. Would you like to create a patch? Regards, Simon
