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

[Heinrich Schuchardt]

Am 2. Dezember 2025 20:46:21 MEZ schrieb Mark Kettenis <mark.kettenis at xs4all.nl>:
>> Date: Tue, 2 Dec 2025 12:52:22 -0600
>> From: Tom Rini <trini at konsulko.com>
>> 
>> 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.

We require C11 for building U-Boot. C11 defines function aligned_alloc(). If we add that function in our U-Boot library we can rid of the #ifdef in Tom's patch.

Best regards

Heinrich


>> > 
>> > 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.
>
>Ah, it is only on the next branch.  Yes
>
>  In file included from tools/generated/boot/image-fit.c:1:
>  In file included from ./tools/../boot/image-fit.c:38:
>  include/malloc.h:824:20: error: conflicting types for 'sbrk'
>    824 | extern Void_t*     sbrk(ptrdiff_t);
>        |                    ^
>  /usr/include/unistd.h:449:7: note: previous declaration is here
>    449 | void    *sbrk(int);
>        |          ^
>  1 error generated.
>
>Which points out another issue with sharing code between U-Boot itself
>and the host tools this way.