Hi Tom,
On Thu, Mar 28, 2024 at 10:20:49AM +0100, Lukasz Majewski wrote:
Dear Community,
I'd like to share with you some thoughts about growth of u-boot's binary size for SPL and u-boot proper.
Board: XEA SoC : imx287 (still in active production) Problem: SPL size constrained to ~55 KiB (This cannot be exceeded). Board design constraints u-boot proper size to less than ~448 KiB
When XEA was added (2019.07):
- u-boot.sb (SPL): 37 KiB
- u-boot.img : 401 KiB
Now (2024.04):
- u-boot.sb (SPL): 40 KiB
- u-boot.img : 427 KiB
(With a _lot_ of effort put to reduce the size)
Hence, the question - would it be possible to take more concern about the binary size growth?
Maybe CI could catch patches, which enable by default some features and the size is unintentionally increased?
I'm open for any feedback and thoughts on "stopping" the binary size increase.
I think that's pretty amazingly small growth for nearly 5 years of bug fixes and feature enhancements that it's likely minor to make granular.
Those results are after using OF_PLATDATA in SPL and other tricks - like compression of DTB in u-boot proper, so this caused some extra effort to keep small.
If LTO is not enabled on this platform
As Fabio pointed out - I shall check if LTO can be (safely) enabled for imx287.
you should be able to use buildman to give you a "bloat" list from v2019.07 to v2024.04 and see if anything sticks out as being something that can be addressed. But that little growth seems pretty good to me at first glance.
Best regards,
Lukasz Majewski
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DENX Software Engineering GmbH, Managing Director: Erika Unter HRB 165235 Munich, Office: Kirchenstr.5, D-82194 Groebenzell, Germany Phone: (+49)-8142-66989-59 Fax: (+49)-8142-66989-80 Email: lukma@denx.de