Re: Thoughts about U-boot binary size increase

Tom Rini
2024-03-28T12:58:49Z

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On Thu, Mar 28, 2024 at 01:55:22PM +0100, Lukasz Majewski wrote:
> Hi Tom,
>
> > On Thu, Mar 28, 2024 at 10:20:49AM +0100, Lukasz Majewski wrote:
> > > Dear Community,
> > >
> > > I'd like to share with you some thoughts about growth of u-boot's
> > > binary size for SPL and u-boot proper.
> > >
> > > Board: XEA
> > > SoC : imx287 (still in active production)
> > > Problem: SPL size constrained to ~55 KiB (This cannot be exceeded).
> > > Board design constraints u-boot proper size to less than
> > > ~448 KiB
> > >
> > >
> > > When XEA was added (2019.07):
> > > - u-boot.sb (SPL): 37 KiB
> > > - u-boot.img : 401 KiB
> > >
> > > Now (2024.04):
> > > - u-boot.sb (SPL): 40 KiB
> > > - u-boot.img : 427 KiB
> > >
> > > (With a _lot_ of effort put to reduce the size)
> > >
> > > Hence, the question - would it be possible to take more concern
> > > about the binary size growth?
> > >
> > > Maybe CI could catch patches, which enable by default some features
> > > and the size is unintentionally increased?
> > >
> > > I'm open for any feedback and thoughts on "stopping" the binary size
> > > increase.
> >
> > I think that's pretty amazingly small growth for nearly 5 years of bug
> > fixes and feature enhancements that it's likely minor to make
> > granular.
>
> Those results are after using OF_PLATDATA in SPL and other tricks - like
> compression of DTB in u-boot proper, so this caused some extra effort
> to keep small.

Yes, and I'm still pretty happy with that. I would encourage you to do
what I suggested, before turning on LTO (as that makes it hard to see
symbol size changes due to the nature of LTO) as what you asked for in
your original email is what I do, and have done for a very long time
now, with 99% of every pull request / branch merge. I'm not saying I
didn't miss anything, but I am saying it's a matter of specific changes
and not a general problem. And if you hadn't previously set the options
to enforce failure to build if hard size constraints are missed, please
do so.

--
Tom

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