[meta-xilinx] Why no support for FSBL?

[Peter Smith]

Thanks for the very comprehensive answer.

Best Regards
Peter

On 21 November 2017 at 14:18, Nathan Rossi <nathan at nathanrossi.com> wrote:

> On 21 November 2017 at 07:08, Peter Smith <salerio at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hi, I’m aware of the meta-xilinx-tools layer, but this needs you to have
> the
> > Xilinx SDK installed (unless I’m mistaken), I was wondering ion there
> were
> > any plans to create support in meta-xilinx for building the FSBL without
> the
> > need for the SDK dependency. Peter
> >
> >
> > On 20 Nov 2017, at 21:05, Giordon Stark <kratsg at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Hi (resending from right address),
> >
> > You can indeed build the FSBL + boot.bin using the meta-xilinx-tools
> layer:
> > https://github.com/Xilinx/meta-xilinx-tools
> >
> > Giordon
> >
> > On Mon, Nov 20, 2017 at 3:03 PM Peter Smith <salerio at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> A question, I was wondering why there is no support for building FSBL
> in a
> >> similar way to that provided by meta-xilinx for the PMU firmware, is
> there a
> >> technical reason or is it just one of those things that has not yet
> been got
> >> around to? Thanks in advance Peter.
>
> So it all comes down to bootgen. The boot.bin built by the bootgen
> tool from XSDK/etc. has an FSBL specific image table which is how it
> encodes multiple images for u-boot.elf, bitstream, etc. Because this
> bootgen tool is not available as public code and the special
> headers/image table are subject to the whim of the FSBL built (and
> indirectly the target version of the Xilinx tools); it is not easy to
> provide support for building a complete boot.bin with FSBL outside of
> the Xilinx tools.
>
> Building FSBL in the same way as PMU Firmware (as in meta-xilinx) is
> possible and years ago I had a very rough recipe for it. However since
> U-Boot SPL support appeared (and subsequent support for boot.bin
> generation with U-Boot's mkimage) it was much more palatable for Linux
> users, as for most cases FSBL was used to load U-Boot anyway and
> U-Boot SPL does a better job at that.
>
> Now with meta-xilinx-tools covering FSBL/bootgen I don't see much of a
> benefit in having FSBL built how PMU firmware is in meta-xilinx. Since
> the reasons behind the users choice to use FSBL are generally because
> it is the flow which Xilinx provides, and so it makes more sense to
> use the better supported flow of building/configuring it.
>
> Regards,
> Nathan
>
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