Hi,

On Wed, 23 Apr 2025 at 08:22, Ahmad Fatoum <a.fat...@pengutronix.de> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> On 4/23/25 14:28, Simon Glass wrote:
> > Hi Anshul,
> >
> > On Wed, 23 Apr 2025 at 04:04, Anshul Dalal <ansh...@ti.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> Hi all,
> >>
> >> I was trying to understand how the go command is expected to work when
> >> used to load custom OSes. My use case requires getting a proprietary OS
> >> to boot using the go command on a TI K3 platform. The OS expects caches
> >> to be flushed and the mmu to be disabled before we jump to it.
> >>
> >> The go command (do_go func in cmd/boot.c) calls the do_go_exec function
> >> underneath which does not seem to have a consistent implementation
> >> across various architectures.
> >>
> >> In RISC-V the implementation (arch/riscv/lib/boot.c:10) calls
> >> cleanup_before_linux before jumping to the loaded binary. This behaviour
> >> would enable the direct use of the go command for booting a custom OS
> >> (like in my use case). Though no such generic implementation exists for
> >> ARM64.
> >>
> >> I was wondering why we have the call to cleanup_before_linux for RISCV
> >> and not ARM64?
> >>
> >> Also, is booting a custom OS using the go command a supported use-case?
> >> If yes, it might be better to rename the function to be more generic
> >> like cleanup_before_os from *_linux and call it for each invocation of
> >> the go command.
> >
> > Yes it is supposed to do what you say. You could rationalise the code
> > a bit, so that all archs do a similar thing, or perhaps just RISC-V
> > and ARM for now.
>
> I ran into issues with go too trying to start barebox and I always
> assumed that go is rather meant to start programs that call back into
> U-Boot using the jump table mechanism. In that case, you likely don't
> want to turn off caches.
>
> What I settled on is having the barebox build generate a FIT image that
> can be used from U-Boot, barebox, coreboot ...etc.
>
> Maybe the same would be also suitable for you? Alternatively, you could
> compile your custom OS as an ELF image and boot that properly as if it
> were a kernel. Both ways would also allow you to specify a load address
> if your OS is not relocatable and pass along arguments.
>
> I went with the FIT route for barebox, because we can now ship device
> trees for all enabled boards in the same FIT image alongside one generic
> second stage barebox with DT support. If you want to support different
> boards with your OS image that might be of interest to you as well.

Yes, FIT is a better route and we can even add an OS type IH_OS_xxx

There's also the option of adding a flag to the 'go' command so that it can

Regards,
Simon

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