[PATCH 1/1] Added arm64 assembly for examples/api crt0

[Tom Rini]

On Tue, May 21, 2024 at 04:54:58PM +0000, Brunham, Kalen wrote:

> Hi Tom,
> 
> Fundamentally I want to create standalone applications that can be
> used to help debug low-level HW issues. The advantage to doing this in
> U-Boot is to leverage existing drivers and other facilities. I agree
> this is niche, but is something I saw one of our power-users do
> recently and are looking to share with our customers. Unfortunately,
> the Makefiles today make this more difficult than it should be, hence
> the desire to change this. My current goal is to enable a user to use
> the stock (unpatched) u-boot to minimally create a hello-world that
> they can execute following the existing examples/standalone steps.  
> 
> Are your plans to deprecate both API and Standalone?

So, the next set of questions become:
- Why isn't it just part of U-Boot? Make your tool a new command
  instead.
- If for license reasons you can't, why not just start from some other
  appropriate for your needs licensed skeleton and bootelf your tool?

We have long not done a great job with the U-Boot standalone API stuff,
and for a number of years at this point a lot of the use cases it was
used for could instead be filled by making an EFI application. There's a
well defined API there, there's lots of examples, and frankly for the
license related questions, makes a much nicer answer.

That there's some power users out there making use of standalone to do
useful things is news to me. Some of them speaking up and offering to
be visible in maintaining it would be good (there's Coverity issues and
lack of CI testing, which should be addressed).

-- 
Tom
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