[U-Boot] "arm: keep all sections in ELF file" breaks Arndale

[Andre Przywara]

On 12/17/2013 04:57 PM, Tom Rini wrote:
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> Hash: SHA1
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> On 12/17/2013 10:47 AM, Andre Przywara wrote:
>> (CCing Inderpal, Chander and Minkyu)
>>
>> On 12/17/2013 04:30 PM, Tom Rini wrote:
>> On 12/17/2013 10:24 AM, Andre Przywara wrote:
>>>>> Hi,
>>>>>
>>>>> the Arndale board does not work anymore with current master HEAD.
>>>>> If I turn on the board, I see exactly nothing.
>>>>>
>>>>> I bisected it down to:
>>>>> 47ed5dd031d7d2c587e6afd386e79ccec1a1b7f7 is the first bad commit
>>>>> commit 47ed5dd031d7d2c587e6afd386e79ccec1a1b7f7
>>>>> Author: Albert ARIBAUD <albert.u.boot at aribaud.net>
>>>>> Date:   Thu Nov 7 14:21:46 2013 +0100
>>>>>
>>>>>       arm: keep all sections in ELF file
>>>>>
>>>>> That patch looks like Chinese to me, does one of you have an idea what's
>>>>> wrong here?
>>>>> Are we missing a section, maybe for the SPL build?
>>
>> So on Arndale, what file do you boot exactly?  It sounds like not
>> u-boot.img but some tool stripping / modifying u-boot (or
>> spl/u-boot-spl) and having relied on certain sections being stripped out
>> before being run.
>>
>>> Good point. Indeed I boot u-boot-dtb.bin (the SPL is
>>> spl/arndale-spl.bin). So the Makefile does:
>>> cat u-boot.bin u-boot.dtb >u-boot-dtb.bin
>>
>>> I guess the address under which U-boot expects to find the attached dtb
>>> changes due to the non-discarding.
>>
>>> Does any of the Arndale people have an idea how to fix this?
>
> That's a little confusing as we use objcopy -O binary to make
> u-boot.bin/u-boot-spl.bin and that would, I would think, drop these
> sections anyhow.  But some checking of binary size with the patch in
> question locally reverted would help shed some light here.

So I did objdump -h on ./u-boot, the diff (sorted by the section name, 
as the order of the section differed, and the size) is:

  .ARM.attributes 0000002d
-.bss            00048b10
+.bss            00048b08
  .bss_end        00000000
  .bss_start      00000000
  .comment        0000001c
@@ -14,8 +14,12 @@
  .debug_loc      00045a4e
  .debug_ranges   00006f70
  .debug_str      000123b4
+.dynamic        00000080
+.dynstr         0000001d
+.dynsym         00000060
  .got.plt        0000000c
  .hash           0000002c
+.interp         00000011
  .rel.dyn        00006fd8
  .rodata         0000ae47
  .text           0002cdf0

- works, + is broken.
+ is HEAD as of yesterday, - is the same with the patch in question 
reverted. So the patch _adds_ some sections to the file.
u-boot-spl is exactly the same, for u-boot-spl.bin the broken version 
ends earlier (but until then is identical). arndale-spl.bin (which I 
flash) is different, though.
Arndale uses CONFIG_OF_SEPARATE, and .text stays the same AFAICS.

I can do some more debugging tomorrow, am grateful for any hints.

Regards,
Andre.