Re: [PATCH 13/15] RFC: lib: Support a binary prefix 0y

Simon Glass
2021-07-23T03:08:01Z

Hi Tom,

On Thu, 22 Jul 2021 at 08:44, Tom Rini <trini@konsulko.com> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Jul 22, 2021 at 07:28:25AM -0600, Simon Glass wrote:
> > Hi Wolfgang,
> >
> > On Thu, 22 Jul 2021 at 03:48, Wolfgang Denk <wd@denx.de> wrote:
> > >
> > > Dear Simon,
> > >
> > > In message <CAPnjgZ0i0BQbP_BOESVazq=1o-2otvKoecVt0n+DrJdkZgrJAg@mail.gmail.com> you wrote:
> > > >
> > > > > But ... do we really *need* all this stuff?
> > > >
> > > > No...
> > > >
> > > > I added binary as an RFC because I have found a few cases where it is
> > > > nice to be able to specify the bits (e.g. programming GPIOs). We could
> > > > update 'md' to support it too.
> > >
> > > Yes, we could, but U-Boot size is continuously growing, even for
> > > constant configurations, i. e. when no nmew features are
> > > wanted/needed.
> >
> > I think in fact my series reduces the size, at least for U-Boot
> > proper, by 500+ bytes.
>
> This is good.
>
> > We could be more aggressive about making even
> > minor new features optional.
>
> I'm not sure this is really a problem, at this point? Looking at
> omap3_beagle (an old and unchanging platorm), for v2021.01 -> v2021.04
> -> v2021.07 the size growth isn't too much in main U-Boot and largely
> comes down to "EFI loader got more fixes / corrections". If someone
> wants to make a separate thread and note functionality of the EFI loader
> that we could make optional while still being compliant with EBBR, OK.
> That would be good, but need to start off with "here is something" and
> not ask "is there something?" as I'm not sure there is. And it might be
> quite appropriate for older platforms that are not concerned with
> supporting modern distributions off the shelf to disable EFI_LOADER in
> their defconfig. But as we went over recently, it is the default way
> most modern distros boot on armv7.

Well I suppose worrying about a few bytes is not so important if
EFI_LOADER (or hopefully soon EBBR) is in use.

Regards,
Simon