[RFC PATCH 1/9] sandbox: Drop special link order treatment of start.o and sdl.o

[Simon Glass]

Hi Tom,

On 2026-05-22T21:27:48, Rasmus Villemoes <ravi at prevas.dk> wrote:
> sandbox: Drop special link order treatment of start.o and sdl.o
>
> On hardware architectures, we need to treat start.o (generated from
> start.S) very special due to the constraints of being a program running
> on hardware in an unknown state. These objects are treated a little
> different than the rest by the linker and linker scripts on various
> architectures.
>
> Sandbox is different, and doesn't need to do that. In fact, it can lead
> to hard to diagnose problems because of just how subtly different the
> treatment is. For example, the comment about LTO in include/event.h
> introduced with commit 87a5d1b5d012 ("event: Add basic support for
> events") was only a sandbox issue because of the event in start.c and
> in turn linking start.o isn't treated the same way as an archive with
> all its sections considered.
>
> Correct all of this by removing the 'head-' lines for cpu.o and sdl.o
> from arch/sandbox/Makefile (and unused cmd_cc_sdl.o lines) and change
> arch/sandbox/cpu/Makefile to treating them both with 'obj-' and not

to treat them both

> 'extra-'.
> [...]
>
> arch/sandbox/Makefile     | 9 ---------
>  arch/sandbox/cpu/Makefile | 5 ++---
>  2 files changed, 2 insertions(+), 12 deletions(-)

> diff --git a/arch/sandbox/cpu/Makefile b/arch/sandbox/cpu/Makefile
> @@ -5,9 +5,8 @@
>  # (C) Copyright 2000-2003
>  # Wolfgang Denk, DENX Software Engineering, wd at denx.de.
>
> -obj-y        := cache.o cpu.o state.o initjmp.o os.o
> -extra-y      := start.o
> -extra-$(CONFIG_SANDBOX_SDL)    += sdl.o
> +obj-y        := start.o cache.o cpu.o state.o initjmp.o os.o
> +obj-$(CONFIG_SANDBOX_SDL)    += sdl.o

The sandbox-specific cmd_cc_sdl.o override already covers sdl.o once
it moves into obj-y, so dropping the duplicate block from
arch/sandbox/Makefile looks safe

Reviewed-by: Simon Glass <sjg at chromium.org>