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wandboard: move environment partition farther from u-boot.img
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Recently I started to notice that u-boot.img built for Wandboard
by some toolchains becomes so large that it basically overlaps with
U-Boot environment area on SD-card.

According to
http://wiki.wandboard.org/index.php/Boot-process#sdcard_boot_data_layout
Wandboard's SD-card layout is as follows:
------------------------------>8---------------------------
Acked-by: Otavio Salvador <[email protected]>
Acked-by: Fabio Estevam <[email protected]>

==========================================================
1. 0x00000000           Reserved For MBR
2. 0x00000200   512     Secondary Image Table (optional)
3. 0x00000400   1024    uBoot Image (Starting From IVT)
4. 0x00060000   393216  start of uboot env (size:8k)
5. 0x00062000           end of uboot env
6. 0x00100000   1048576 Linux kernel start
7. 0x0076AC00   7777280 start of partition 1
------------------------------>8---------------------------

So for U-Boot we have 383kB (392192 bytes).

But in up to date U-Boot for Wandboard we build separately
 a) SPL
 b) u-boot.img

which gives us a bit more detailed SD-card layout:
------------------------------>8---------------------------
==========================================================
1. 0x00000000           Reserved For MBR
2. 0x00000200   512     Secondary Image Table (optional)
3. 0x00000400   1024    SPL
4. 0x00011400   70656   u-boot.img
5. 0x00060000   393216  start of uboot env (size:8k)
6. 0x00062000           end of uboot env
...
------------------------------>8---------------------------

>From that layout we may calculate amount of space reserved for
u-boot.img. It's just 315kb (322560 bytes).

Now if I build U-Boot with Sourcery CodeBench ARM 2014.05 produced
u-boot.img is already more than we expected
(323840 bytes instead of "< 322560"):
------------------------------>8---------------------------
ls -la u-boot.img
-rw-rw-r-- 1 user user 323840 Jul  5 07:38 u-boot.img
------------------------------>8---------------------------

Funny enough if I rebuild U-Boot with ARM toolchain available in
my Fedora 23 distro u-boot.img becomes a little bit smaller:
------------------------------>8---------------------------
ls -la u-boot.img
-rw-rw-r-- 1 user user 322216 Jul  5 07:39 u-boot.img
------------------------------>8---------------------------

What's worse this problem might not affect people most of the time
because what happens people would just copy u-boot.img on SD-card and
live in happiness with it... well until somebody attempts to save
environment in U-Boot with "saveenv" command which will simply
overwrite the very end of u-boot.img.
That will lead to unusable SD-card until user dd u-boot.img on
SD-card again.

I may foresee this issue in the future to become more visible once we
add more features in U-Boot for Wandboard or just existing code base
becomes bulkier and people will consistently get larger u-boot.img
files produced.

IMHO there's an obvious solution for all that - just move U-Boot's env
to the very end of the gap between U-Boot and the first real partition
on the SD-card. This patch will follow
8fb9eea ("mx6sabre_common: Fix U-Boot corruption after 'saveenv'").
So env is still not in the very end of the gap (obviously 256kb is way
too much for U-Boot's env) but at least we have now the same
partitioning for i.MX6 boards.

Signed-off-by: Alexey Brodkin <[email protected]>
Cc: Fabio Estevam <[email protected]>
Cc: Otavio Salvador <[email protected]>
Cc: Peter Robinson <[email protected]>
Cc: Tom Rini <[email protected]>
Cc: Peter Korsgaard <[email protected]>
Cc: Wolfgang Denk <[email protected]>
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abrodkin authored and sbabic committed Jul 19, 2016
1 parent a02ab5e commit 67ff9e1
Showing 1 changed file with 1 addition and 1 deletion.
2 changes: 1 addition & 1 deletion include/configs/wandboard.h
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -193,7 +193,7 @@
#define CONFIG_ENV_SIZE (8 * 1024)

#define CONFIG_ENV_IS_IN_MMC
#define CONFIG_ENV_OFFSET (6 * 64 * 1024)
#define CONFIG_ENV_OFFSET (768 * 1024)
#define CONFIG_SYS_MMC_ENV_DEV 0

#endif /* __CONFIG_H * */

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