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

[Tom Rini]

On Tue, Dec 02, 2025 at 12:24:03PM -0600, Tom Rini wrote:

> 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/
> 
> But longer term, unless people say they need and use these tools, I'm
> inclined to remove them from CI and remove this workaround, for the
> v2026.04 release.

We have solved this specific problem without a large work-around.
However, the more general question remains. Does anyone use these tools
on Windows / macOS?

-- 
Tom
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