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

Andre Przywara andre.przywara at arm.com
Thu Oct 19 13:03:55 UTC 2017


Hi,

On 19/10/17 09:26, 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.

Is that really such a problem? How many people rely on having their
custom environment preserved over an update? (That's an honest question)

I see that the environment is hardcoded to 0x88000 in env/Kconfig.
Where does this value come from? Why is it this rather arbitrary value?

I believe the real limit should be 1MB - ENV_SIZE.
Most sane partitioning tools put the first partition at 1MB, so this
leaves the space below that to the bootloader/firmware.

This would put the actual limit at 856 KB for now - that should be
enough for everybody ;-)
We could even push this further by reducing ENV_SIZE to say 64KB.

At least that would buy us some time to address this issue in a more
sustainable way.

Cheers,
Andre.

> 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?)
> 
> Maxime
> 
> Maxime Ripard (3):
>   ARM: sunxi: Disable USB host options by default
>   ARM: sunxi: Disable FAT write by default
>   efi_loader: Do not enable it by default for sunxi
> 
>  arch/arm/Kconfig       | 4 ----
>  lib/efi_loader/Kconfig | 2 +-
>  2 files changed, 1 insertion(+), 5 deletions(-)
> 


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