On 5/21/19 4:29 PM, Marcel Ziswiler wrote: > On Tue, 2019-05-21 at 14:49 +0200, Marek Vasut wrote: >> On 5/21/19 12:33 PM, Marcel Ziswiler wrote: >>> On Tue, 2019-05-21 at 12:50 +0300, Alex Sadovsky wrote: >>>> It's slightly off-topic but I wonder whether this ongoing >>>> deprecation >>>> of ARMv4 and ARMv5 (first in GCC, then in U-Boot) really >>>> simplifies >>>> anything at all. >>>> There are tons of devices that are still working good and there >>>> are >>>> even ARMv5-based MCUs that are still produced (such as CH561 >>>> manufactured by WCH). >>> >>> Please note that as of today Marvell is also still producing them >>> PXAs >>> which are not to go end-of-life before later next year I believe. >>> >>>> IMHO it makes sense to drop only the XScale-specific tuning first >>>> and >>>> to treat PXA (and similar CPUs) as a more generic armv5te. I >>>> wonder >>>> what to do when GCC drops ARMv5 completely... >>> >>> I believe it was only an issue with early gcc 8 but does work just >>> fine >>> again with later 8.2 or 8.3 versions. >>> >>> However, what is more concerning to me is that in today's >>> convoluted >>> moloch known as U-Boot there may simply not be any space any more >>> for >>> something truly embedded but somewhat limited like PXA based >>> hardware. >> >> If we ignore the PXA25x/26x, the PXA27x has loads of SRAM for U-Boot >> SPL >> and then can load U-Boot proper into DRAM. What's the problem ? > > At least on the Colibri PXA270 it is more about NOR flash storage. The > factory configuration block gets stored at an offset of 0x40000 which > leaves only 256 KB for the boot loader. However, of course one could > migrate it all over to using SPL and store U-Boot proper after the > factory configuration block. But to change all that for our very oldest > module which is going end-of-live the next year may not make too much > sense.
True > So the real issue with U-Boot for such platforms is basically that the > complexity and footprint increased steadily leaving them behind and > eventually just removing them may be the logical conclusion. After all > we are talking about just a boot loader which is used to boot the > "real" system and good is. However, if even one percent of today's U- > Boot is actually used for booting it is probably already quite a lot > (;-p). The size growth is a problem, even for todays' systems, and it contradicts this "universal" part in U-Boot . That's a real issue which should be addressed , and this fevered push for DM/DT conversion does not help at all. -- Best regards, Marek Vasut _______________________________________________ U-Boot mailing list U-Boot@lists.denx.de https://lists.denx.de/listinfo/u-boot
