On Fri, Mar 26, 2021 at 12:46 PM Fotis Panagiotopoulos <f.j.pa...@gmail.com> wrote: > Oh, sorry. > Attached again as .txt. Is it OK now?
Yes, the files went through this time. Thanks! More below... > > A tool that takes the Kconfig + chip+ memorymap and make a linker include > > file and the config code for the heap may be the way to go. > > I am pretty sure that a "tool" will not be able to cover all use cases. > Over the years I had to make custom scripts to account for: > * Bootloaders > * Binary blops > * Firmware headers > * ROM files > * DMA buffers > * External memories > etc etc.. > > Do you believe that a tool can be made that can handle everything? It is very annoying to have to do all of that, and error prone, and it's pretty awful when there's a potentially clobbering situation (like a heap allocation clobbering a DMA buffer) that might not manifest for hours or days in a running firmware. Could be very hard to debug. I like the idea of a tool that takes Kconfig settings and emits a correct linker script. Could a tool account for *all* of the above? And, you forgot to mention: Different toolchains with their own linker script dialect. I suppose that at first, it would not support all of that. It would probably start out supporting only a small subset of options, and then each user who has a different requirement would have to improve the tool, and hopefully open a PR so the rest of the community benefits from it. If we want to try this, I would recommend a Kconfig option CUSTOM_LINKER_SCRIPT. If set, the tool will not run, leaving your custom script in place. The good thing about such a tool: see for example at the nucleo-h743zi board. It has 5 different linker scripts and you have to choose the correct one(s), depending on flash, kernel, elf, etc. If a tool could generate the right one automatically, it would be harder work up front to create the tool, but then it would be much less work in maintenance later. Also it would be integrated with in-tree improvements so out-of-tree boards don't break every time we change something in the tree. Nathan
