To quote the author:
The bootflow feature provide a built-in way for U-Boot to automatically
boot an Operating System without custom scripting and other customisation.
This is called 'standard boot' since it provides a standard way for
U-Boot to boot a distro, without scripting.

It introduces the following concepts:

   - bootdev - a device which can hold a distro
   - bootmeth - a method to scan a bootdev to find bootflows (owned by
                U-Boot)
   - bootflow - a description of how to boot (owned by the distro)

This series provides an implementation of these, enabled to scan for
bootflows from MMC, USB and Ethernet. It supports the existing distro
boot as well as the EFI loader flow (bootefi/bootmgr). It works
similiarly to the existing script-based approach, but is native to
U-Boot.

With this we can boot on a Raspberry Pi 3 with just one command:

   bootflow scan -lb

which means to scan, listing (-l) each bootflow and trying to boot each
one (-b). The final patch shows this.

With a standard way to identify boot devices, booting become easier. It
also should be possible to support U-Boot scripts, for backwards
compatibility only.

...

The design is described in these two documents:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ggW0KJpUOR__vBkj3l61L2dav4ZkNC12/view?usp=sharing

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kTrflO9vvGlKp-ZH_jlgb9TY3WYG6FF9/view?usp=sharing