[PATCH v1 0/3] Relocate U-Boot in the last bank

Ilias Apalodimas ilias.apalodimas at linaro.org
Thu Mar 26 12:51:06 CET 2026


There was a discussion recently on the mailing lists regarding our 
management of memory above ram_top [0]. The tl;dr is that we have two problems.

The first one is that U-Boot always relocates to the top of the first available
bank unless there's special board code to sidestep that. The second is we don't
successfully deal with devices that can only do 32-bit DMA.

This patch series deals with the first problem by adding a Kconfig option
allowing platforms to relocate to the top of the last discovered bank.

It's worth noting that this is easily testable with QEMU

qemu-system-aarch64 -m 8192 -smp 2 -nographic -cpu cortex-a57 \
    -machine virt,secure=off \
    -bios u-boot.bin \
    -device virtio-rng-pci \
    -drive id=os,if=none,file="$image" \
    -device virtio-blk-device,drive=os \
    -object memory-backend-ram,id=ram0,size=4G \
    -object memory-backend-ram,id=ram1,size=4G \
    -numa node,memdev=ram0 \
    -numa node,memdev=ram1

# RELOCATE_LAST_BANK not set
Hit any key to stop autoboot: 0
=> bdinfo
[...]
relocaddr   = 0x000000013f66c000
reloc off   = 0x000000013f66c000
[...]
lmb_dump_all:
 memory.count = 0x1
 memory[0]	[0x40000000-0x23fffffff], 0x200000000 bytes, flags: none
 reserved.count = 0x2
 reserved[0]	[0x13d507000-0x13d509fff], 0x3000 bytes, flags: no-notify, no-overwrite
 reserved[1]	[0x13d50aff0-0x23fffffff], 0x102af5010 bytes, flags: no-overwrite
devicetree  = board
[...]
TLB addr    = 0x000000013ffe0000
irq_sp      = 0x000000013e50aff0
sp start    = 0x000000013e50aff0
Early malloc usage: e88 / 2000
=>

# RELOCATE_LAST_BANK enabled

=> bdinfo
[...]
relocaddr   = 0x000000023f66c000
reloc off   = 0x000000023f66c000
[...]
lmb_dump_all:
 memory.count = 0x1
 memory[0]	[0x40000000-0x23fffffff], 0x200000000 bytes, flags: none
 reserved.count = 0x2
 reserved[0]	[0x23d507000-0x23d509fff], 0x3000 bytes, flags: no-notify, no-overwrite
 reserved[1]	[0x23d50aff0-0x23fffffff], 0x2af5010 bytes, flags: no-overwrite
devicetree  = board
[...]
TLB addr    = 0x000000023ffe0000
irq_sp      = 0x000000023e50aff0
sp start    = 0x000000023e50aff0
Early malloc usage: e88 / 2000
=>

[0] https://lore.kernel.org/u-boot/CAC_iWjKFAzpj3B_MEW7-dnOrcAV-rfkhXXo8Bv0KgLNP2VJxRA@mail.gmail.com/

Ilias Apalodimas (1):
  common: Allow relocations on the top of the last bank

Marek Vasut (2):
  fdtdec: Deduplicate iterator function
  fdtdec: Introduce fdtdec_setup_mem_ram_top() to determine end of
    topmost DRAM bank

 Kconfig          |  7 ++++
 common/board_f.c |  2 ++
 include/fdtdec.h | 16 +++++++++
 lib/fdtdec.c     | 89 +++++++++++++++++++++++++-----------------------
 4 files changed, 71 insertions(+), 43 deletions(-)

-- 
2.51.0



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