On Friday 22 October 2021 09:47:35 Vagrant Cascadian wrote:
do some boards use board-specific tools as part of their build processes?
Lot of boards are using mkimage for generating final U-Boot binary.
Prior U-Boot 2021.10 all 32-bit mvebu boards used own specific version of mkimage to generate final U-Boot binary. mkimage had own compile time options (defined in board include header files) which generated unique ./tools/mkimage binary, specific for just one board.
Since U-Boot 2021.10 now all 32-bit mvebu boards are using one common mkimage binary. So you can even do defconfig for some x86 board, build mkimage binary and then you can use this mkimage binary also for building final mvebu (arm) U-Boot binary.
Side effect of this change was hard dependency on openssl, but we are discussing how to solve and remove that hard dependency.
I do not know if there are any processors, SoCs or boards which require board-specific version of some tool (e.g. mkimage) in U-Boot 2021.10.