Re: [RFC] Kbuild support for ARM FIT images

[Pavel Machek <pavel@denx.de>]

On Mon 2013-03-18 17:57:46, Russell King - ARM Linux wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 06:49:32PM +0100, Pavel Machek wrote:
> > What I wanted to say is that kernel build traditionaly produced
> > something useful, something bootloader can actually boot. Currently,
> > make uImage produces u-boot image. Please keep that capability.
> 
> Unfortunately, there is a fundamental problem with uImage.  It encodes
> the load address, and that is utterly incompatible with the goal of
> having a kernel image which boots on multiple platforms.
> 
> uImage isn't going anywhere for the time being, but you will find
> that:
> 
> a) recent kernels will just wrap the zImage without a DTB, so
>    appended DTBs can't be used with it
> b) it won't work with MULTIPLATFORM-enabled kernels, unless you
>    provide make with a LOADADDR= argument to tell it where the
>    uImage is to be loaded - which is platform specific.
> 
> (b) fundamentally can't be solved in kbuild.  If you want to use
> uImage with multiple platforms from the same zImage, then you need
> to generate multiple uImage files with different load addresses.
> That's purely - and solely - down to the dysfunctional uImage format.

I know. uImage is not perfect. But solution should be "adopt a better
format" (ARM FIT?), not "drop support for making useful images
altogether" as Olof proposed before.
									Pavel
-- 
(english) http://www.livejournal.com/~pavelmachek
(cesky, pictures) http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~pavel/picture/horses/blog.html