[U-Boot] U-Boot PXA support

[Tom Rini]

On Tue, May 21, 2019 at 10:33:39AM +0000, Marcel Ziswiler wrote:
> On Tue, 2019-05-21 at 12:50 +0300, Alex Sadovsky wrote:
> > It's slightly off-topic but I wonder whether this ongoing deprecation
> > of ARMv4 and ARMv5 (first in GCC, then in U-Boot) really simplifies
> > anything at all.
> > There are tons of devices that are still working good and there are
> > even ARMv5-based MCUs that are still produced (such as CH561
> > manufactured by WCH).
> 
> Please note that as of today Marvell is also still producing them PXAs
> which are not to go end-of-life before later next year I believe.
> 
> > IMHO it makes sense to drop only the XScale-specific tuning first and
> > to treat PXA (and similar CPUs) as a more generic armv5te. I wonder
> > what to do when GCC drops ARMv5 completely...
> 
> I believe it was only an issue with early gcc 8 but does work just fine
> again with later 8.2 or 8.3 versions.
> 
> However, what is more concerning to me is that in today's convoluted
> moloch known as U-Boot there may simply not be any space any more for
> something truly embedded but somewhat limited like PXA based hardware.

As Marek touched on elsewhere, part of the problem is maintainer
overload.  Many of these older platforms just don't get the same focus
as the newer ones as the people that are listed as maintaining them have
a lot of other areas to focus on.  But if we can bring back PowerPC 8xx,
we can keep PXA going, I'm sure.

I wish I could have merged in Simon Goldschmidt's series to introduce a
more generic "fail to build if $X is over the limit" framework as to me,
one of the big things that halts size growth is when platforms fail to
build rather than silently overflow their run-time space.

Now I see colibri_pxa270 is currently (gcc-7.3) at 247k.  And I'm sure
that's larger than desired, but how close to the hard limit is it?  Is
thumb2 valid on that setup?

Thanks!

-- 
Tom
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