Re: [PATCH v2 2/2] ARM: OMAP2+: Pad SPL binary to 8-byte alignment before DTB

[Anshul Dalal <anshuld@ti.com>]

On Thu Jan 15, 2026 at 1:30 PM IST, Ilias Apalodimas wrote:
> Hi Marek,
>
>
> On Thu, 15 Jan 2026 at 02:02, Marek Vasut <marek.vasut@mailbox.org> wrote:
>>
>> On 1/14/26 3:17 PM, Tom Rini wrote:
>>
>> Hello Tom,
>>
>> >>> OK. And why can't we make that check at $sym rounded up, and ensure our
>> >>> build targets pad? Going back to the commit message here, it's easy to
>> >>> tell the linker to place $sym at the right spot, but it's hard to make
>> >>> sure the output is padded. So having typed all that, maybe we need to
>> >>> do:
>> >>> d) Update linker scripts to ALIGN(8) the above symbols and have the make
>> >>> targets use dd to ensure padding prior to concatenation
>> >>> ?
>> >> d) looks like what we should do, yes
>> >
>> > Poking at this harder, I'm not actually sure we need to use dd at all,
>> > but we do need to fix our linker scripts, and then going back to when
>> > Ilias reworked and cleaned up a bunch of them, get the changes reviewed
>> > by the toolchain experts he got ahold of :)
>>
>> I wonder if LD can always guarantee trailing alignment of the binary. If
>> it can, then yes, dd would only be obscuring alignment problems and
>> trailing DT look up failures which are hard to debug. It would be nice
>> to drop the dd part, but I am not sure if we are able to do it reliably.
>
> LD won't pad align anything that doesn't have code afterwards. IOW
> inserting an . = ALIGN(8); just before the .end symbol won't guarantee
> alignement unless there's a section/code following.
> What you can do is add an ALIGN(8) inside the last section. That will
> guarantee that the last symbol is aligned. There's also the SUBALIGN
> command which messes around with the input section alignment -- that
> normally is automatically calculated, but Tom tested it yesterday
> without success.
>
> I'll have a closer look to the linker script in case I can come up
> with something more elegant. Which defconfig should I use to reproduce
> the issue?

We have reproduced the issue on multiple K3 SoCs, to start with you can
make use of the am62px_evm_r5_defconfig with arm-none-eabi toolchain
from ARM[1] with version 13.3.rel1.

[1]: https://developer.arm.com/downloads/-/arm-gnu-toolchain-downloads

>
> Cheers
> /Ilias