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Handle vexpress board removal in U-Boot

Description

Looks like the board we use, vexpress_ca9x4, was removed earlier this year in U-Boot. This will be a hard blocker for us to update for us to update to the next Yocto LTS in April 2022.

Estimating this is tricky, because it's not clear what the fix will be. Some alternatives I can think of are:

  • vexpress_ca9x4 was added more than five years ago. There may be better alternatives today. Check if a more recent board can be booted through QEMU and used in testing.

  • Do what the commit message says: Adapt the board to the CONFIG_DM_MMC framework and reintroduce it upstream. This is an ancient board, probably not in use anymore, but they may be sympathetic to the cause if it means U-Boot can be tested in QEMU.

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Kristian Amlie August 31, 2021 at 8:44 AM

Done, but spawned to upstream the patches. This depends on a third party and will be taken on the side, outside of sprints.

eystein.maloy.stenberg August 3, 2021 at 2:40 PM

starts it this sprint, estimating to get through about half (10 SP) in the first sprint.

eystein.maloy.stenberg April 22, 2021 at 10:34 PM

OK, thanks!

Kristian Amlie April 22, 2021 at 11:35 AM

While working on I found that U-Boot can be compiled with the qemu_arm_defconfig target, which I have verified works and can boot a kernel. However, it has some drawbacks, in that it replaces the SD card storage driver with a virtio driver. This significantly changes how the storage is accessed, both from Linux and from the bootloader, and requires quite intrusive changes to adapt to. The changes are easy to do, but further removes us from the actual hardware scenario, meaning that QEMU testing has less value. Still, it may still be worthwhile if vexpress becomes more and more difficult to support.

Kristian Amlie April 22, 2021 at 8:06 AM

: For the backlog. We have until next year to fix this, but it's dangerous to wait too long with this. This is a hard blocker, we won't be able to even compile without this, and the fix is quite uncertain.

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Created April 22, 2021 at 8:04 AM
Updated June 25, 2024 at 12:02 PM
Resolved August 31, 2021 at 8:44 AM