Hello, On 4/29/26 4:23 PM, Simon Glass wrote: > On Tue, 28 Apr 2026 at 08:06, Tom Rini <[email protected]> wrote: >> On Tue, Apr 28, 2026 at 04:26:31PM +0530, Beleswar Prasad Padhi wrote: >>>> I guess the real question here is, does the spec allow this to be >>>> omitted like that? >>> >>> >>> Could you please point me to the spec? I could not find it. >> >> Sure: https://github.com/open-source-firmware/flat-image-tree/ > > It is mandatory for kernel and firmware images. Instead of allowing it > to be optional for 'kernel', we created 'kernel_noload' some years > back. > > Which image type are you using in your case?
FWIW, barebox has always interpreted lack of the load property to mean that it should just compute a suitable address itself (i.e. free memory aligned as Linux expects on that platform - same as kernel_noload). Writing that into the spec also allows for Beleswar's use case here, although it doesn't give the guarantee that the address will always be the image address. I think that giving a guarantee about the image address is wrong: - If the code is not relocatable, then its load address can equally well be written into the FIT image node - If the code is relocatable, then forcing the load address to be the image data addresses will make non-external FIT unfeasible for most users, because of code having the wrong alignment and for external FIT, it will mean careful placement of the FIT itself is required, so we don't end up with misbehavior at runtime. I thus suggest, the spec leaves it to bootloaders to select appropriate load addresses if its missing and if the bootloader can't, it should refuse boot (current U-Boot behavior). Future U-Boot behavior will likely need to be adapted, so this loading at image data address is only done for these specific firmware images and not in general as otherwise it would preclude any other use in future. Cheers, Ahmad > > Regards, > Simon > -- Pengutronix e.K. | | Steuerwalder Str. 21 | http://www.pengutronix.de/ | 31137 Hildesheim, Germany | Phone: +49-5121-206917-0 | Amtsgericht Hildesheim, HRA 2686 | Fax: +49-5121-206917-5555 |
