[RFC] imx8mm-evk: Generate a bootable flash.bin again

[Frieder Schrempf]

Hi Fabio,

On 18.08.21 03:44, Fabio Estevam wrote:
> Hi Heiko,
> 
> On Tue, Aug 17, 2021 at 12:56 AM Heiko Schocher <hs at denx.de> wrote:
> 
>> I am unsure here, if it makes sense to overwrite flash.bin with the
>> binary which contains SPL and u-boot.itb. May others want to use
>> them (as I currently use them for signing them)
> 
> I thought about that too. Frieder suggested I use a different name for
> the SPL file, such as spl.bin.
> 
> I am concerned that renaming flash.bin to spl.bin may break i.MX8MM
> targets that do not use binman, such as the verdin-imx8mm board.
> 
>> Why not imx-boot as image name as in NXP sources?
> 
> NXP U-Boot also generates the final binary called "flash.bin"
> 
> My main motivation for sending this RFC patch is to avoid imx8mm-evk
> breakage when people upgrade
> to U-Boor 2021.07.
> 
> Prior to 2021.07: only flash.bin was required. Yocto recipe, for
> example, will no longer produce a bootable image
> after the upgrade to 2021.07. This is the breakage I would like to avoid.

On the other hand, for example I have already adapted my (downstream) Yocto environment to the binman setup in 2021.07 and changing it back to the original behavior in the next release will break my Yocto recipes again. The breaking change is already in the release, so the harm is already done. Should we really spend effort to revert to the old scheme or rather switch to proper and meaningful names for the images now that we already broke it. But I see your point that this probably would require to move all boards to binman first before doing so.

And as Heiko already said, overwriting the SPL image with the final image is not really an option in my opinion. We might need the SPL image for other purposes and we should definitely make sure that it's still around after the final image has been built.

Best regards
Frieder