Re: [RFC] fitImage support on ARM64

[Arnaud Ferraris <arnaud.ferraris.external@sigfox.com>]

Hello Bhupesh,

Thanks for your answer.

On 14/06/2018 07:50, Bhupesh Sharma wrote:
> FIT is a u-boot construct - so one question to understand the
> background better - are you using u-boot bootloader to boot the Linux
> kernel on your arm64 platforms?
We are indeed using u-boot (this is a Marvell Armada 3700-based board).

> If yes, can you please confirm that it is not a product targeting
> server markets?
It is not, actually we are building an IoT gateway.

> For the normal kexec -p operation (i.e. not the kexec file_load
> operation), we rely on passing the device tree to the crashkernel via
> dtb= option (which is done by kexec-tools), so how do you plan to
> handle the same?
I added 2 fields to the kexec_info structure for the dtb, and another 2 
for the initrd:

     char *initrd;
     off_t initrd_size;
     char *dtb;
     off_t dtb_size;

While parsing the FIT image, I just fill these fields with the right 
data pointers & size, and for arm64 these are to be used within the 
arm64_load_other_segments function in kexec-arm64.c:

      if (arm64_opts.dtb) {
          dtb.name = "dtb_user";
          dtb.buf = slurp_file(arm64_opts.dtb, &dtb.size);
+    } else if (info->dtb) {
+        dtb.name = "dtb_fit";
+        dtb.buf = info->dtb;
+        dtb.size = info->dtb_size;
      } else {
          result = read_1st_dtb(&dtb);

Same kind of processing is used for the initrd.

For this architecture at least, FIT image support is only a few lines of 
arch-specific code ; the big part (FIT image parsing and binary blobs 
extraction) can be shared, just like the code for uImage support is.

> If we need to bring out the dtb from the FIT image to support the
> current design, do we really require the piecemeal FIT image support
> in kexec-tools?
It doesn't look like a huge piece of dev to me, actually I already have 
a working implementation (a basic one, only extracting the 
kernel/dtb/initrd binary blobs from the FIT image and feeding them to 
kexec_load, with no hash or signature checking) using the libfdt 
currently included in kexec-tools.

Regards,
Arnaud

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