Hi Moteen,

On 2/12/25 10:18 AM, Moteen Shah wrote:
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In the U-Boot pre-relocation stage, if the parent node lacks bootph*
property and the driver lacks a pre-reloc flag, all of its subsequent
subnodes gets skipped over from driver binding—even if they have a
bootph* property.

This series addresses the issue by scanning through all the subnodes
of the current node for the bootph* property and propagate it to all
of its supernodes, ensuring that all of the applicable drivers are
bound and probed prior to relocation. This series implements one of
the solutions mentioned in [0].

Since, all the nodes which are not having any bootph* property will
also be traversed, we will have to incur some overheads in boot time,
hence protecting the feature under a config.

Boot time overheads:
     Baseline: Upstream u-boot

     Patch test: Baseline + remove all bootph-all properties from
     *-u-boot.dtsi except the ones which are supposed to be probed
     but have no bootph in any of its subnode.

     J7200 delta from baseline  : ~100ms
     J784S4 delta from baseline : ~350ms


Pfew, that's a lot of time. Can you tell us what's the delta in percentage from baseline? Because if your system is usually booting in one minute, 100ms isn't too bad :)

FYI, I believe we've been hit by this issue on Rockchip but cannot find the thread or patch right now.

For TPL and SPL, the Device Tree is parsed and looked for appropriate bootph properties. Any node which doesn't have a bootph property and doesn't have any children with a bootph property is removed from the tree. However, the bootph property (if only present in a children node) isn't propagated (meaning the node doesn't get the property). This is done by fdtgrep.

The issue is that for U-Boot proper pre-relocation, the whole DT is taken and only nodes with the appropriate bootph property is probed and children nodes do NOT count as opposed to the TPL/SPL case.

My idea was that maybe we should rather propagate the property, at the very least in U-Boot proper pre-relocation. This does mean we will increase (by which amount?) the size of the DT in U-Boot proper because we would add this property recursively up the tree from a node that has the bootph property for U-Boot proper pre-relocation. This **could** be an issue as the DT could be passed between stages and we would then hit the size limit. Sadly, I didn't take the time to look into adding support for that in fdtgrep nor will I have the time to do it, so take this as me sharing my wish list with you.

I would really like to avoid having it guarded by a knob though because I really think this is an issue that should simply be fixed unconditionally for every platform with DT support.

Cheers,
Quentin

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