Re: [Buildroot] [PATCH v3 1/6] package/binutils-bare-metal: new package

From: Peter Korsgaard <peter@korsgaard.com>
To: "Frager, Neal" <neal.frager@amd.com>
Cc: "Simek, Michal" <michal.simek@amd.com>,
	"buildroot@buildroot.org" <buildroot@buildroot.org>,
	Luca Ceresoli <luca.ceresoli@bootlin.com>,
	"thomas.petazzoni@bootlin.com" <thomas.petazzoni@bootlin.com>,
	"Erkiaga Elorza, Ibai" <ibai.erkiaga-elorza@amd.com>
Subject: Re: [Buildroot] [PATCH v3 1/6] package/binutils-bare-metal: new package
Date: Sun, 01 Oct 2023 13:24:28 +0200	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <877co67fgz.fsf@48ers.dk> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <7AD8C3E2-4A82-434F-8C3D-6B9B5E53E798@amd.com> (Neal Frager's message of "Mon, 25 Sep 2023 03:43:21 +0000")

>>>>> "Frager," == Frager, Neal <neal.frager@amd.com> writes:

Hello,

 >>> Is this ok for both of you?
 >> 
 >> I'm OK with the whole approach, except for the sentence "I do not
 >> believe there is currently any organized effort to upstream any of
 >> these patches"... which is probably already clear to the recipients
 >> of this message, and thus is not going to be solved in this thread,
 >> however I just want to be sure my position is clear. I'd also like to
 >> stress that I appreciate a lot the work you are doing to properly
 >> support the pmufw in Buildroot. Thanks!
 >> 
 >> Luca

 > Your position is very clear.  And I can assure you that both Ibai and I agree with it.

 > It would be much better if all of these binutils and gcc patches for
 > microblaze go upstream, and both Ibai and I have pushed for it
 > internally at AMD / Xilinx.

 > The only thing I can say is that change is always possible.
 > Yesterday, we could not build a zynqmp pmufw, versal plm or versal
 > psmfw in buildroot.  Today, we have submitted a solution to change
 > that.

 > Tomorrow (figurative meaning the future), we hope to get all these
 > binutils and gcc patches upstream, so the upstream toolchain matches
 > the AMD Xilinx distributed toolchain.

 > One step at a time.

Sure! Sorry, I am somewhat late to the review game here. I wonder how
this fits with Luca's zynqmp-pmufw-builder?

E.G. today the setup is that the pmufw is built outside Buildroot and we
just point the u-boot package to where it can fetch the prebuilt
firmware binary - This is nice in the sense that it is fast and simple,
but makes is somewhat annoying to make modifications to the firmware.

This series instead goes to the other extreme, E.G. we build the entire
microblaze toolchain from scratch and then use it to build the firmware
and use it in the u-boot package - This is nice because it is all in
Buildroot and we have it all under control, but also brings quite some
build time overhead for building the toolchain before building the
(small) toolchain. You can naturally "solve" it by using two defconfigs,
E.G. one that builds the pmufw and another that uses the prebuilt one,
but it isn't very handy either.

Would an in between option not be more interesting, E.G. use (or
download) a prebuilt microblaze toolchain and use that to build the
firmware? That would still give the flexibility to easily tweak the
firmware, but not the overhead of building the toolchain every time?

I guess the problems with that are what to do about the meta-xilinx
patches and where/who wants to host a prebuilt one?

-- 
Bye, Peter Korsgaard
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