[PATCH v3 0/7] Qualcomm: teach the build system to emit signed ELF images

[Tom Rini]

On Thu, Jun 12, 2025 at 04:16:36PM +0200, Casey Connolly wrote:

> With several new Qualcomm platforms appearing on the mailing list, all
> of which build U-Boot as an ELF, sign it, and then flash it to some
> partition on the board, we're getting a lot of defconfigs which just
> contain a debug UART and a TEXT_BASE address. This leads to needless
> rebuilds in CI of effectively the same image, and needless duplication
> of build instructions.
> 
> To address this, let's introduce a new tool "mkmbn.py", this is based
> on the existing qtestsign[1] tool but is (currently) hardcoded to
> only handle the Dragonwing and IPQ boards which use MBN header v6.
> Additionally, the tool contains a lookup table that maps from a boards
> DT compatible property to the load address it needs. Since it's highly
> unusual for different boards using the same SoC to have different load
> addresses, generic platform matching is also done (e.g. "qcom,qcm6490").
> 
> With this tool in place, we teach binman to use it and introduce
> a qcom-binman.dts file to describe the image. The tool will emit a
> u-boot.mbn file for supported platforms, for unsupported platforms the
> u-boot MBN etype in binman will print a notice explaining that no mbn
> file is built and to look at tools/qcom/mkmbn/mkmbn.py
> 
> Finally, the defconfigs are cleaned up by moving the debug UART
> definitions to config fragments (since it doesn't make sense to have
> them enabled by default anyway) and remove CONFIG_REMAKE_ELF. Notably,
> the qcs9100_defconfig is removed entirely since the same binary can
> be created with just make arguments. This platform entirely lacked
> documentation to begin with, which should be addressed by future
> patches.
> 
> The Qualcomm documentation is also cleaned up, a new "signing" page
> is added to briefly cover the what and why of MBN signing, and board
> specific pages are updated to explain the new build process.
> 
> These patches have been tested on the RB3 Gen 2, but additional
> testing for other platforms would be super useful.
> 
> [1]: https://github.com/msm8916-mainline/qtestsign

Thanks for switching this all over to binman. My big question is, is
there binman documentation that you wished was clearer, or that should
be written to make this easier for the next SoC / architecture that
needs to come along and add to binman?

-- 
Tom
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