In terms of code maintenance and development feasibility it is always a better approach to have out-of-tree code or binary to be part of in-house source tree.
This is what exactly it was done for SPL, if I'm not wrong. So can we do the same thing for ATF on ARM64 SoCs?
We are using ATF (on Allwinner) to switch EL3 to EL2 for start loading U-Boot proper and minimal PSCI, PMIC initialization. So assuming the functionality of ATF (like here) is limited so the code it require can be limited too, so why can't this code to be part of U-Boot tree?
This would ultimately avoid out-off-tree ATF builds with associated variable exporting during u-boot builds.
More over this idea would also help to design a single-step bootloader where it can't depends on out-of-tree sources.
Code sync from ATF source to U-Boot can be possible in-terms licensing point-of-view since ATF licensed under BSD-3-Clause.
I'm thinking this can be a worth-idea to look at it and I'm sure It may require some hard changes and other things to consider but just posted to understand how hard or feasible or meaningful it is?
Feel free for any comments?
Jagan, Amarula Solutions India.