Re: [GIT PULL] ~RISC-V~Starfive devicetrees fixes for v7.0-rc6

["Ilya Sorochan" <k0tran@altlinux.org>]

On Thu, Mar 26, 2026 at 07:36:07AM -0700, E Shattow wrote:
> To be clear the "riscv: dts: starfive: jh7110-common: fix jh7110 SoC
> boot from SD-card." commit does not affect Linux whatsoever, there is no
> problem to boot Linux from SD Card impacted by having or not having this
> commit. This also is not common, so should not be in jh7110-common, as
> more JH-7110 SoC products by-the-numbers have transistor logic replacing
> this signal selection to the StarFive loader in BootROM and so
> precluding this from functioning.

This commit affects U-Boot+Linux ability to boot from SD-card.
Tested on StarFive VisionFive 2 and Pine64 Star64.
I'm not aware if this is the same for other jh7110-based boards, but assumed so.
 
> This ignores the wider discussion about StarFive both deprecating this
> capability (for Secondary Program Loader i.e. U-Boot SPL) of StarFive
> Loader in JH-7110 BootROM loading from SD Card being deprecated
> officially in the latest StarFive JH-7110 Technical Reference Manual and
> StarFive JH-7110 Boot User Guide documentation, and the ongoing GPL
> non-compliance by StarFive for use of GPL 2.0+ code in the JH-7110
> BootROM; the latter being important if we want to accurately attempt to
> support this deprecated feature set as a community (even when ignoring
> for the moment this copyright license non-compliance).
>
> I have done an ~80%+ analysis on Ghidra decompilation of the JH-7110
> BootROM, and openly invite anyone that would like to help get this
> effort to 100% is welcome to so that we may publish and refer to this
> for technical competence. I do not object to the community supporting
> this deprecated capability if there is any real documentation not based
> on rumors and memes; but no one has offered to do take a moment to do
> this most basic of fact finding. Evidently the StarFive maintainer(s)
> have refused to support this, GPL non-compliance persists and only a
> rough description from Hal has been written to the U-Boot developer mail
> list that does not match my analysis, all while complaining about the
> capability not being supported going forward.

Appreciate the effort!
However I can't see how this is related.

I traced this property a little in the U-Boot repo:
- 503fc8548197 Hal added it to VisionFive v1.3b (with mmc pins)
- 6bbe95ef7208 Hal moved it (and other common things) into
  jh7110-common-u-boot.dtsi
- 27f617019dd0 E removed it with jh7110-common-u-boot.dtsi
- 762f85bb2e36 Tom squash-updated upstream dts

New device trees did not contain this property. This is how they were introduced
into the Linux: b127dbf9e1ebbfbcded4 ("riscv: dts: starfive: Add mmc nodes on
VisionFive 2 board")

I do not know if this miss is intentional or not. However it would be nice to
be able to boot from SD-card again.