[PATCH 7/7 v2] arm: remove redundant section alignments

[Ilias Apalodimas]

Hi Richard,

Pasting some of the discussions we had over IRC for completeness.

On Tue, 12 Mar 2024 at 19:00, Richard Henderson
<richard.henderson at linaro.org> wrote:
>
> On 3/12/24 04:08, Ilias Apalodimas wrote:
> > index 33f4624b561d..ccdd1966cfbc 100644
> > --- a/arch/arm/cpu/armv8/u-boot.lds
> > +++ b/arch/arm/cpu/armv8/u-boot.lds
> > @@ -132,7 +132,7 @@ SECTIONS
> >
> >       _end = .;
> >
> > -     .bss ALIGN(8): {
> > +     .bss : {
> >               __bss_start = .;
> >               *(.bss*)
> >               __bss_end = .;
>
> The code in arch/arm/lib/crt0_64.S assumes __bss_end - __bss_start is a multiple of 8.
> But that could probably be replaced by a proper call to memset fairly easily.
>
> > diff --git a/arch/arm/cpu/u-boot.lds b/arch/arm/cpu/u-boot.lds
> > index b6b19a4174fe..a9fcbbf22e96 100644
> > --- a/arch/arm/cpu/u-boot.lds
> > +++ b/arch/arm/cpu/u-boot.lds
> > @@ -155,7 +155,7 @@ SECTIONS
> >
> >       __image_copy_end = .;
> >
> > -     .rel.dyn ALIGN(4) : {
> > +     .rel.dyn : {
> >               __rel_dyn_start = .;
> >               *(.rel*)
> >               __rel_dyn_end = .;
>
> Because of the overlay, this affects .bss too.
>
> The code in arch/arm/lib/crt0.S may or may not be configured to use memset.  When it
> isn't, it requires __bss_end - __bss_start to be a multiple of 4.  Why does this not
> always use memset?

I think it's due to size restrictions in SPL. Since I can't test all
affected platforms, I prefer leaving it as is at least for now.
I'll explicitly align sections to 4/8 bytes in v3. Once we get this
merged we can try and clean those up as you suggested on a followup
patchset

Thanks
/Ilias
>
>
> r~