Dropping macOS and Windows host tool builds and support in U-Boot

[Tom Rini]

On Tue, Dec 02, 2025 at 07:49:07PM +0100, Mark Kettenis wrote:
> > Date: Tue, 2 Dec 2025 12:24:03 -0600
> > From: Tom Rini <trini at konsulko.com>
> 
> Hi Tom,
> 
> > Hey all,
> > 
> > I am wondering if at this point in time, anyone still builds our host
> > tools (fw_printenv / fw_getenv, a few others) to run on macOS or
> > Windows, natively.
> > 
> > I ask for two reasons. The first of which is that a reason we still have
> > to support Azure (despite its slowness) for CI is it's where we have
> > macOS and Windows hosts. But at this point in time there's so many ways
> > to have Linux userspace running on Windows or macOS that I don't know
> > that there's any value to these builds.
> > 
> > The second reason is more macOS specific and is that with:
> > 
> > commit 8fbcc0e0e839a8e25f636c76e59311033d3817b5
> > Author: Marek Vasut <marek.vasut+renesas at mailbox.org>
> > Date:   Thu Nov 13 12:54:51 2025 +0100
> > 
> >     boot: Assure FDT is always at 8-byte aligned address
> >     
> >     The fitImage may contain FDT at 4-byte aligned address, because alignment
> >     of DT tags is 4 bytes. However, libfdt and also Linux expects DT to be at
> >     8-byte aligned address. Make sure that the DTs embedded in fitImages are
> >     always used from 8-byte aligned addresses. In case the DT is decompressed,
> >     make sure the target buffer is 8-byte aligned. In case the DT is only
> >     loaded, make sure the target buffer is 8-byte aligned too.
> >     
> >     Signed-off-by: Marek Vasut <marek.vasut+renesas at mailbox.org>
> > 
> > Which does things we must do, we now don't build on macOS. Why? As best
> > I can tell (and for a general purpose OS, is a good call), memalign(..)
> > doesn't exist and you need to use posix_memalign, a not drop-in
> > replacement. We could spend some time reworking the code here for that,
> > but for now I've instead gone with this workaround so that CI can
> > continue:
> > https://lore.kernel.org/u-boot/20251202162250.2613085-1-trini@konsulko.com/
> 
> Are you sure about this?
> 
> The code in boot/image-fdt.c is part of U-Boot itself, not the host
> tools.  As such it should be irrelevant whether the host OS provides
> memalign() or not; U-Boot provides its own implementation.

We use parts of this code as-is (and some other less obvious files) when
building host tools.

> OpenBSD doesn't have memalign() either.  But I can still build the
> targets I care about on OpenBSD.
> 
> Or is this about sandbox?  Did sandbox ever work on macOS?

It's about "tools-only" build target, but also I suspect that if you try
the next branch right now it'll also fail and we'll need to figure
something out.

-- 
Tom
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