[U-Boot] [PATCH 0/3] sunxi: Fix boot of Cubietruk and al.

[Maxime Ripard]

On Thu, Oct 19, 2017 at 10:44:54AM +0200, Alexander Graf wrote:
> On 10/19/2017 10:26 AM, Maxime Ripard wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > Most featureful boards, such as the Cubietruck, have been broken since
> > the release 2017.09.
> > 
> > This is due to a size increase of the binary that will trip us across
> > the size we've been using in the u-boot-sunxi-with-spl.bin file.
> > 
> > We would have two ways to work around it. The first one would be to
> > just increase the offset of the environment. However, since it would
> > break all the environments of our users and possibly the custom
> > partition scheme that they would have created, it doesn't really seem
> > like a smart move.
> > 
> > Another one would be to start trimming down a bit our enabled options
> > in order to reduce the size and to gain some extra space for users
> > customisations. I've taken care some of the low hanging fruits, and we
> > should probably take another go at it in the future (and add a size
> > check in the image build somehow?)
> 
> How about we add the size check first before crippling the feature
> set of sunxi boards? Then maybe rather disable lesser used features
> than efi_loader?

All the features have some users. All the kind of arguments that have
been sent so far are that "but I use this feature". Yes. You probably
do. But you can have the same kind of argument for any of the features
enabled.

Let's look at the features enabled by a Cubietruck defconfig:
  - GMAC: I'm pretty sure there's some people using network out there,
    and you don't want to break those.
  - AHCI: I'm pretty sure there's some people using their SATA disk
    out there, and you don't want to break those.
  - PSCI: I'm pretty sure there's some people using multiple CPUs out
    there, and you don't want to break those.
  - Fastboot: I'm pretty sure there's some people reflashing their
    systems out there, and you don't want to break those.
  - DFU: I'm pretty sure there's some people reflashing their systems
    out there and that don't like fastboot, and you don't want to
    break those.
  - MMC: I'm pretty sure there's some people using their MMC card
    out there, and you don't want to break those.
  - USB: I'm pretty sure there's some people using their USB devices
    out there, and you don't want to break those.

tl; dr: using that kind of argument, nothing is removed, and we keep
building non-functional (as in, non-booting) binaries. Is that
*really* what you're suggesting?

Maxime

-- 
Maxime Ripard, Free Electrons
Embedded Linux and Kernel engineering
http://free-electrons.com
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