imx8mp_evk: boot error "alloc space exhausted"

[ZHIZHIKIN Andrey]

Hello Peng,

I've tried to boot the i.MX8M Plus EVK with U-Boot 2020.10 and faced the
error message during the boot process, which indicates that the allocation
space in early malloc area is exhausted.

Looking at the log, I was able to bisect it to the commit 28fff3fa1c ("imx:
imx8mp_evk: fix boot issue"), where the CONFIG_SYS_MALLOC_F_LEN has been
reduced from 0x10000 to 0x8000 and CONFIG_SPL_SYS_MALLOC_SIMPLE was enabled.

Extract from the patch shows the following diff:
-CONFIG_SYS_MALLOC_F_LEN=0x10000
+CONFIG_SYS_MALLOC_F_LEN=0x8000
+CONFIG_SPL_SYS_MALLOC_SIMPLE=y


If the CONFIG_SYS_MALLOC_F_LEN is returned to the original value - error
message disappears, and I can observe that the total occupation of early malloc
area (reported via bdinfo) contains following count:
-----------------
u-boot=> bdinfo
<snip>
Early malloc usage: a648 / 10000
-----------------

As it can be seen, the value 0xa648 overflows the imposed limit of 0x8000,
causing 2 allocations after ATF execution to fail.

According to the Patchwork [1], this has been already reported by Fabio but
there was no resolution provided to address this further. Neither the commit
message in 28fff3fa1c provides any additional hint on why those config options
were setup with those values.

V1 of this patch series did not have any config options in it, and the
changelog of v2 is also missing to advise why those options were added to the
series.

Can you please explain why CONFIG_SYS_MALLOC_F_LEN and CONFIG_SPL_SYS_MALLOC_SIMPLE
config options were added with that patch, and if it is safe to have them
reverted to the original values?

Another 


Thanks a lot!

Regards,
Andrey


Link: [1]: http://patchwork.ozlabs.org/project/uboot/patch/20200512093901.14831-2-peng.fan@nxp.com/