[coreboot] ARM Trusted Firmware build issue

Stefan Reinauer stefan.reinauer at coreboot.org
Thu Jul 21 04:33:03 CEST 2016


On 20-Jul-16 16:19, Julius Werner wrote:

> Well... honestly, isn't it our fault for uprevving to a buggy
> toolchain? If there was a way to write this code such that it will
> result in the binary output ARM wants and works on all versions,
> submitting a patch to them would be reasonable... but otherwise I can
> kinda understand that they don't want to use an inferior solution
> because we insist on using an assembler that doesn't know how to
> assemble stuff correctly. Isn't the best solution to only uprev archs
> that really need new compiler features until the GCC guys manage to
> produce a stable version?

Yes, I was wrong. After reading the other threads and talking with 
Martin, it indeed seems to be a toolchain issue.
However, the new toolchain had many advantages over the previous one, 
and the code was not in (our) ARM TF at the time we uprevved.

The maintenance burden of keeping different versions of toolchains 
supported for different architectures as part of the reference toolchain 
is imho almost always significantly higher than actually fixing the 
issues. (Especially if they are not time critical)

Martin produced a binutils fix for the issue. Whether the binutils 
people will find it to be the "right" fix is still to be found out, but 
it seems to allow compiling the latest, unmodified ARM TF.

Stefan



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