[PATCH 00/13] efi: Tidy up confusion between pointers and addresses

[Tom Rini]

On Tue, Nov 26, 2024 at 08:39:05AM -0700, Simon Glass wrote:
> Hi Heinrich,
> 
> On Tue, 26 Nov 2024 at 02:10, Heinrich Schuchardt <xypron.glpk at gmx.de> wrote:
> >
> > On 25.11.24 21:44, Simon Glass wrote:
> > > The EFI-loader implementation converts things back and forth between
> > > addresses and pointers, with not much consistency in how this is done.
> > >
> > > Within most of U-Boot a pointer is a void * and an address is a ulong
> >
> > No. It is phys_addr_t that was introduced to handle the sandbox's
> > virtual addresses.
> >
> > And we should keep this sandbox stuff out of the EFI code. They are only
> > needed for the command line interface.
> 
> No. My statement is correct and long predates sandbox. U-Boot has
> always used ulong. Using an address is generally much easier than a
> pointer, so I believe this design decision was (and remains) a good
> one. I certainly would not support changing it. The phys_addr_t type
> has nothing to do with sandbox.

At the high level, I think parts of the problem are that when U-Boot
went from 32bit architectures to 36bit architectures (assorted PowerPC
Freescale parts) to 64bit architectures that no, we didn't make some
concious and consistent statement that "ulong is for address (except
when it's not). If you look at the linux kernel, phys_addr_t is physical
addresses, ulong is virtual addresses.

And so phys_addr_t was introduced, iirc, for PowerPC where we had a
32bit architecture with 36bit addresses and had to deal with that.

-- 
Tom
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