Re: [PATCH v3 1/8] dt-bindings: arm: qcom: Document MSM8939 SoC binding

From: Stephan Gerhold
Date: Wed Jan 18 2023 - 04:29:17 EST


On Tue, Jan 17, 2023 at 02:48:39AM +0000, Bryan O'Donoghue wrote:
> Document the MSM8939 and supported boards in upstream Sony "Tulip" M4 Aqua
> and Square APQ8039 T2.
>
> MSM8939 is one of the older SoCs so we need to expand the list of
> qcom,board-ids to allow for the bootloader DTS board-id matching
> dependency.
>

The original LK bootloaders cannot boot your msm8939.dtsi correctly,
because a spin-table implementation is required to get the other CPU
cores up. This means that a modified bootloader is always needed from
the upstream point of view, since I doubt anyone wants to use these
devices with a single core only. lk2nd (as the primary spin-table
implementation right now) has never required qcom,board-ids and any
custom LK would be easy to patch to ignore these.

Do you already have a bootloader with spin-table support deployed in the
field that can be no longer easily modified to ignore the qcom,board-id?

If not, and you're planning to keep using the downstream patches to
bring the CPU cores up without spin-table/PSCI then you might as well
add the qcom,board-id as downstream patch as well.

If we don't support the original bootloaders in a usable way upstream
then we should not add MSM8939 to the allow list of broken bootloaders
either, in my opinion.

Thanks,
Stephan