[U-Boot] [PATCH 3/3] efi_loader: Do not enable it by default for sunxi

[Peter Robinson]

On Thu, Oct 19, 2017 at 10:06 AM, Peter Robinson <pbrobinson at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 19, 2017 at 10:01 AM, Maxime Ripard
> <maxime.ripard at free-electrons.com> wrote:
>> On Thu, Oct 19, 2017 at 09:43:20AM +0100, Peter Robinson wrote:
>>> On Thu, Oct 19, 2017 at 9:26 AM, Maxime Ripard
>>> <maxime.ripard at free-electrons.com> wrote:
>>> > The EFI loader support takes around 31kB on an ARMv7 board, which makes us
>>> > trip across the size limit we've had on the U-Boot binary.
>>> >
>>> > Since it's not an essential feature, disable it by default for ARCH_SUNXI
>>> > so that we get back some extra room for user customisations.
>>>
>>> Does this disable it on aarch64 boards by default such as the Pine64?
>>> If so NAK as Fedora, SUSE and I'm pretty sure Debian all use EFI to
>>> boot aarch64 devices and this would regress this for all those
>>> distros.
>>
>> This is something that Fedora, Suse and I'm pretty sure Debian can add
>> to their defconfig. These are just default configuration, not
>> one-size-fits-all configuration.
>
> So you're making at least three groups of users do more work? It could
> also be argued that those that need the smaller space could disable it
> if they don't need it in their configuration.

Ultimately the problem with the argument about disabling it by default
and distros can enable it if they want to is a false one. By enabling
it by default we have devices that ship with SPI  or NAND flash, like
a bunch of the OrangePis do now, be able to work with all
distributions out of the box without any requirements of distros to
produce a firmware (something I'd really prefer to leave to the device
makers) to boot a number of Linux OSes OOTB. I think this is a good
thing for the entire ecosystem. I don't want to regress that, I'd
sooner get the size checks in place and then review rather than what
seems like a "quick win"