Hi Daniel,

On 2/15/25 4:13 PM, Daniel Golle wrote:
Hi Quentin,

On 10 February 2025 16:25:23 UTC, Quentin Schulz <quentin.sch...@cherry.de> 
wrote:
[...]
What I can say from glancing at the code is that for Rockchip they do the 
following:

Register a bootsource type (e.g. MMC, SPI, I2C, USB, etc...), a bootsource 
instance of that type (e.g. MMC0, SPI3, I2C7, ...). The mapping between what 
the ROM says the device is vs what it is in the DT is done in their 
Barebox-specific DT via this custom prop in /chosen:

barebox,bootsource-<bootsourcetype><bootsourceinstance> = &label;  # à-la 
/aliases

This gets read and resolved and then inserted as

/chosen/bootsource = "/some/path"

into the kernel DT.

We are doing something quite similar downsream at openwrt.org for MediaTek 
router SoCs, see for example:

https://github.com/openwrt/openwrt/blob/main/package/boot/uboot-mediatek/patches/310-mt7988-select-rootdisk.patch

https://github.com/openwrt/openwrt/blob/main/target/linux/mediatek/files-6.6/arch/arm64/boot/dts/mediatek/mt7988a-bananapi-bpi-r4.dtsi#L32

https://github.com/openwrt/openwrt/blob/main/target/linux/mediatek/files-6.6/arch/arm64/boot/dts/mediatek/mt7988a-bananapi-bpi-r4-emmc.dtso#L60


Of course we could use the standard "bootsource" property instead, but having a 
way to reference the volume or partition used as rootfs instead of just passing a 
referencd to a physical device is advantagous...


If I understood correctly, your prebuilt DT would have

/ {
    chosen {
        rootdisk-emmc = <&rootfs_in_emmc>;
        rootdisk-nor = <&rootfs_in_nor>;
        rootdisk-sd = <&rootfs_in_sd>;
        rootdisk-spim-nand = <&rootfs_in_ubi>;
    };
};

and then at runtime you would populate /chosen/rootdisk property with the "rootdisk-<medium>" string with <medium> matching whatever the BootROM reports. I assume the goal is to somehow make sure that the rootfs is loaded from the same storage medium as the one used by the BootROM to load the first stage bootloader?

Can you confirm I did get that right?

I was specifically NOT aiming /chosen/bootsource to represent the storage medium used to load the kernel or rootfs, but rather the medium that was used by the BootROM to load the first stage of the bootloader that is user-flashable/uploadable.

You could very well decide to load/mount your rootfs from SD even if the BootROM loaded the first stage bootloader from SPI-NOR. This property is about representing the latter, not the former and not merging the meaning of both into one.

However, I could see a BootROM being able to report from which partition and controller it loaded the first stage bootloader, and then it'd make sense to have that in /chosen, either as part of /chosen/bootsource or an additional property like /chosen/bootsource-partition.

Cheers,
Quentin

Reply via email to