u-boot pre-reloc

• 了解pre-reloc attribute

1.Introduction

  The driver model provides two ways to pass the device information, platform data and device tree.

  In the platform data way, the pre-reloc DM scan checks if each driver has DM_FLAG_PRE_RELOC flag, that is, each driver has the pre-reloc attribute. Only drivers with DM_FLAG_PRE_RELOC will be bound before relocation.

  In the device tree control, the existence of “u-boot,dm-pre-reloc” is checked for each device node. The driver flag “DM_FLAG_PRE_RELOC” is never checked. That is, each device owns the pre-reloc attribute.

  Drivers should generally work both with platform data and device tree, but this inconsitency has made our life difficult.

1.1.Pre-Relocation Support

  For pre-relocation we simply call the driver model init function. Only drivers marked with DM_FLAG_PRE_RELOC or the device tree ‘u-boot,dm-pre-reloc’ property are initialised prior to relocation. This helps to reduce the driver model overhead. This flag applies to SPL and TPL as well, if device tree is enabled (CONFIG_OF_CONTROL) there.

  Note when device tree is enabled, the device tree ‘u-boot,dm-pre-reloc’ property can provide better control granularity on which device is bound before relocation. While with DM_FLAG_PRE_RELOC flag of the driver all devices with the same driver are bound, which requires allocation a large amount of memory. When device tree is not used, DM_FLAG_PRE_RELOC is the only way for statically declared devices via U_BOOT_DEVICE() to be bound prior to relocation.

  It is possible to limit this to specific relocation steps, by using the more specialized ‘u-boot,dm-spl’ and ‘u-boot,dm-tpl’ flags in the device tree node. For U-Boot proper you can use ‘u-boot,dm-pre-proper’ which means that it will be processed (and a driver bound) in U-Boot proper prior to relocation, but will not be available in SPL or TPL.

  To reduce the size of SPL and TPL, only the nodes with pre-relocation properties (‘u-boot,dm-pre-reloc’, ‘u-boot,dm-spl’ or ‘u-boot,dm-tpl’) are keept in their device trees (see README.SPL for details); the remaining nodes are always bound.

1.2. symbol definition

  After relocation and jumping into the real U-Boot binary it is possible to determine if a node was bound in one of SPL/TPL stages.

There are 4 settings currently in use：

• u-boot,dm-pre-proper: U-Boot proper pre-relocation only
• u-boot,dm-pre-reloc: legacy and indicates any of TPL or SPL Existing platforms only use it to indicate nodes needed in SPL. Should probably be replaced by u-boot,dm-spl for new platforms.
• u-boot,dm-spl: SPL and U-Boot pre-relocation
• u-boot,dm-tpl: TPL and U-Boot pre-relocation

2.Device tree

  The U-Boot device tree is filtered by the fdtgrep tools during the build process to generate a much smaller device tree used in SPL (spl/u-boot-spl.dtb)
with:

• the mandatory nodes (/alias, /chosen, /config)
• the nodes with one pre-relocation property:
  ‘u-boot,dm-pre-reloc’ or ‘u-boot,dm-spl’

fdtgrep is also used to remove:

• the properties defined in CONFIG_OF_SPL_REMOVE_PROPS
• all the pre-relocation properties
  (‘u-boot,dm-pre-reloc’, ‘u-boot,dm-spl’ and ‘u-boot,dm-tpl’)

All the nodes remaining in the SPL devicetree are bound (see driver-model/README.txt).