Back to Home11/13/2025, 2:10:48 PM

Denx (a.k.a. U-Boot) Retires

synergy20

117 points

36 comments

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11/13/2025, 2:10:48 PM
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Discussion (36 comments)

Showing 36 comments

kevin_thibedeau

6d ago

8 replies

[flagged]

bsimpson

5d ago

1 reply

For those missing the reference, NAMBLA is the "man/boy love association" (as in pedophiles).

octoberfranklin

5d ago

Back before SWATting was a thing, signing up people you disliked as members of NAMBLA was all the rage.

If you ask me it was funnier, and less risk of anybody actually dying.

bitwize

5d ago

1 reply

It's also the name of a mathematical vector derivative operator (∇).

rdlw

5d ago

3 replies

Interesting, I only knew it as the del until now

weinzierl

5d ago

1 reply

OMG, how did you remember that

  nabla x nabla = labla(ce)?

henearkr

5d ago

1 reply

I think you meant Laplace (Laplacian operator).

weinzierl

5d ago

1 reply

That's the mnemonic I was taught, but granted, it takes some artistic license to make it rhyme.

henearkr

4d ago

Ha! lol ^^ Ok, I see!

okanat

5d ago

And I thought only ∂ is called "del".

thatfunkymunki

5d ago

i thought it was the symbol for gradient?

edit: ah, the name of the symbol for the gradient operator is nabla

henearkr

5d ago

1 reply

To scientific-oriented minds it only refers to the mathematical operator.

I personally did not know about, and don't care about, the "horrifying" thing you see in nabla. And I will keep being like that.

If we were to start tracking all the things that are "a typo away from a bad thing", not a lot of words would be left.

benzible

5d ago

2 replies

I'm sure you have a list of things that you would not want to be "one typo away" from.

stephen_g

5d ago

1 reply

There are too many things to really worry about it too much. It's not really how language works anyway - like would you say "You don't want to call your organisation the Rare Books Association because 'rare' is only one letter away from 'rape'?" - clearly that's ridiculous.

RiverCrochet

5d ago

"Rare Books A**ociation" already has 1 bad word right in it. No typo needed.

henearkr

5d ago

I don't. One typo away means it stays different.

numpad0

5d ago

1 reply

Never heard of the term in question, is the word similar sounding to this by accident or is it tongue-in-cheek inspiration of some sort?

stephen_g

5d ago

I've never heard of it either until reading these comments (I'm in Australia). Assuming the NA in that acronym means North America (?) and given that Denx and this new entity is German it's probably safe to assume that they haven't heard of it either.

gspr

5d ago

Don't help those unsavory people hog a large part of our shared namespace.

mcmoor

5d ago

I've seen other comment for the supposed unsavory thing but I've never heard about it, like, at all. Only know it as the mathematical operator. Also being used as card name for a children card game that's a bit infamously censor heavy so I think it's safe enough https://yugipedia.com/wiki/Mathmech_Nabla

neilv

5d ago

I used to study news, which meant reading a lot of it, so maybe I'm not representative, but I immediately noticed that.

Whoever tastefully drew their logo in lowercase might've warned them not do it as all-caps elsewhere, if they were aware of the US brand issue.

If I had to refer to this brand name in text, such as in specs, I wouldn't do all-caps like they have. (To US people, who may be familiar with the toxic brand from written news, US journalism style guides tend to put initialisms and acronyms in all-caps, unlike in parts of Europe.) I would capitalize only the first letter.

rfmc

5d ago

I mean, North American Marlon Brando Look-Alikes are not that bad.

rmoriz

5d ago

1 reply

The founder and owner, Wolfgang Denk, sadly passed away in 2022. https://lists.denx.de/pipermail/u-boot/2022-October/497955.h...

Deeg9rie9usi

5d ago

Wolfgang was a great man. Beside of U-Boot his company was also deeply involved in the Linux real-time extension Xenomai: https://lore.kernel.org/xenomai/87v8oa60bx.fsf@xenomai.org/

fukka42

5d ago

1 reply

U-Boot is pretty cool, I like how scriptable it is.

joezydeco

5d ago

1 reply

U-boot is scriptable, but it's awkward. You put snippets of shell-like commands into environment variables and then connect them all together. It's the most powerful bootloader I've ever worked with, but writing new stuff and debugging it is tedious.

rcxdude

5d ago

Yeah, I strongly prefer barebox, if it's an option. You can just write shell scripts in it.

mmmlinux

5d ago

2 replies

Doesn't most of the embedded Linux world run on u-boot? whats going to happen to that market now?

akdev1l

5d ago

Seems that it will be maintained by those using it (eg: companies and hobbyists alike)

U-boot will not die from this

jojomodding

5d ago

The answer is in the link you clicked: U-boot will be maintained as the open-source project it is, with some engineers previously working at Denx going to a specific different company with the express purpose of supporting U-boot.

dominicq

5d ago

1 reply

So long and denx for all the fish!

bayindirh

5d ago

And for the (yellow) submarines!

andrekandre

5d ago

1 reply

  > After 20 successful years in the embedded world, the DENX holders decided to wind-down operations and retire. ... As a result of this process, the company entered voluntarily liquidation. 

  > Still looking for great support ? Former DENX’s engineers joined NABLA, a new company created to provide high level support .... You will find the same expertise and quality support you experienced in many years in DENX.

first impression is, i wonder if they ever considered just selling the company to the employees and let them continue it...?

trenchpilgrim

5d ago

Looks like the founder passed away a few years ago, perhaps this was easier for his inheritors.

rogermeier

5d ago

Wolfgang and me introduced the concept of the SPDX-License-Identifier, see https://spdx.dev/learn/handling-license-info/ also landed within the Kernel later, beside of many things we did for our stuff at Siemens, upstream first such as https://github.com/u-boot/u-boot/tree/master/board/siemens

zoobab

5d ago

Damn i have a Denx parallel port JTAG adaptor Somewhere in my stock:

http://www.zoobab.com/denx-bdm4jtag

Enjoy retirement!

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ID: 45915069Type: storyLast synced: 11/19/2025, 12:18:03 PM

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