Query on RISC-V booting ABI

[Yao Zi]

On Fri, Nov 21, 2025 at 02:00:46AM +0000, Ivan Velickovic wrote:
> Hello everyone,
> 
> My understanding of the general RISC-V bootflow ABI is that each boot stage provides the hart ID and DTB
> in a0 and a1 respectively. From [1] I can see that U-Boot also adheres to that.

I think the ABI is only defined for Linux. OpenSBI follows a similar
convention, but provides a raw binary with no image header, and requires
an extra fw_dynamic_info parameter if dynamic image is used.

> For my use-case, I am typically booting my OS/application with U-Boot via the `go` or `bootelf` commands.
> I believe that currently these methods do not adhere to this ABI, and I’m wondering if someone could clarify
> whether that is a mistake or intentional?

There's some previous discussion about passing hart ID/DTB, too with
bootelf[3], but I think the patch is stalled. Here's the v2[4] but I've
never seen v3.

Personally speaking, I think it's a better idea to pack your customized
kernel into a Linux-style image, in which way existing facilities could
be re-used, and ABI stability is guaranteed, too.

> I can see that for `bootm` for Linux images for example, the ABI is preserved [2].

Yes, and similar convention also preserved in common/spl/spl_opensbi.c
which loads OpenSBI. But for "go" and "bootelf", you couldn't tell what
ABI the image really follows, so preserving the de-facto ABI may benefit
in some situation, but I personally won't consider the current
implementation buggy.

> Thank you,
> Ivan
> 
> [1]: https://docs.u-boot.org/en/latest/arch/riscv.html
> [2]: https://github.com/u-boot/u-boot/blob/2bc0715b558fa1ac5c88b11e250740b16a905837/arch/riscv/lib/bootm.c#L100.

Regards,
Yao Zi

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[3]: https://lore.kernel.org/u-boot/ME0P300MB13096732AF44AC5409B9D0D49F96A@ME0P300MB1309.AUSP300.PROD.OUTLOOK.COM/
[4]: https://lore.kernel.org/u-boot/SY7P282MB5675687EA430C83D458678F89F77A@SY7P282MB5675.AUSP282.PROD.OUTLOOK.COM/