[PATCH v2 0/1] meson: Demonstration of using binman to produce the image

[Simon Glass]

Hi Ferass,

On Wed, 30 Aug 2023 at 11:53, Ferass El Hafidi
<vitali64pmemail at protonmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi Simon,
>
> > So I wonder how best to move this forward so that we can build things
> > using binman and everything works?
>
> It's still not ready yet, but I'm working on porting U-Boot SPL to some
> Amlogic SoCs [1]. I'm currently working on Amlogic S905 boards, but
> eventually I'll work on Amlogic S905X devices too. And speaking of
> signing, Jonas Karlman wrote amlimage, and integrated it into mkimage,
> and I applied his patch to my tree. There's a few things to be aware of
> about Amlogic signing and binaries in general, however.
>
> amlimage was intended for use with U-Boot SPL, which obviously has
> no support for Amlogic's FIP format and as such amlimage will only do as
> little as possible to get the bootROM to load U-Boot SPL. Most of the
> packaging format is handled by BL2. The fact that the signing process is
> completly different across SoC generations makes it difficult to
> implement them all into one single tool (and by which I mean all of it,
> not just signing BL2 for the bootROM to run it, that's mostly the same
> across SoCs). amlimage has been confirmed to work on GXBB (ODROID-C2 and
> the KII Pro set-top box), GXL (librecomputer lepotato), and SM1 (ODROID-C4).
>
> My U-Boot SPL port is still rather incomplete. As of today, it still
> can't boot anything from any storage device. The goal eventually is to
> be able to load upstream TF-A BL31 and U-Boot+linux.
>
> While Amlogic distributes proprietary BL31 binaries upstream Trusted
> Firmware-A has a port for some Amlogic SoCs [2], but as far as I know
> SM1 (which is the SoC generation your ODROID-C4 is using) is still
> unsupported. GXBB, GXL, AXG, and G12A are all supported however, but the
> overall port still lacks some features the proprietary implementation
> has.
>
> As for the SCP firmware (aka. BL30) I'm not aware of any
> reverse-engineering efforts for that.
>

Thanks for your efforts on this. I look forward to seeing where it ends up.

> Honestly, in my opinion, including proprietary and poorly-written
> Amlogic utilities lacking a proper license, into U-Boot looks like a bad idea.

With Binman, we don't really include them in U-Boot; we allow them to
be fetched easily so that a complete build can be produced.

I don't like it either, but for users it is better than doing the
build manually.

>
> [1]: https://git.vitali64.duckdns.org/misc/u-boot-kii-pro.git/log/?h=wip/spl
> [2]: https://git.trustedfirmware.org/TF-A/trusted-firmware-a.git/tree/plat/amlogic
>
> Cheers.
>

Regards,
Simon