Carlos, Tom,
On Sat, 4 Jun 2016 14:39:22 -0300 (BRT), Carlos Santos wrote:
So, why? I don't like the idea of making FIT support in mkimage conditional.
If FIT is not to be conditional then what's the purpose of the CONFIG_FIT_SIGNATURE configuration option? Looks like it exists exactly to make FIT support conditional, which seems to be a reasonable approach, since it helps to reduce the size of the boot loader.
CONFIG_FIT_SIGNATURE is I guess optional because it requires OpenSSL at *build* time and the U-Boot developers don't want to force everyone to have OpenSSL available to build U-Boot.
However, FIT support does not require any special build dependency, so probably there's little interest from the U-Boot folks to make it optional.
This makes the life of distribution people harder, not easier. The functions in common/bootm.c should be being discarded in U-Boot itself when we don't have CONFIG_FIT_SIGNATURE. Thanks!
The patch exists because of "distribution people". I sent a patch to Buildroot[1] which was refused because it added dependencies on DTC and evolved to several follow-ups [2,3,4].
Right, *but* it is not because we make FIT support optional in Buildroot that we have to make it optional in U-Boot.
We can perfectly have an option in Buildroot to enable/disable FIT support which does *not* enable/disable FIT support in the U-Boot, but only ensures that the relevant runtime dependencies (i.e DTC) are enabled.
Of course, if the U-Boot developers want to make FIT support in the bootloader itself an optional feature, why not, but it's clearly not a requirement from our side.
Best regards,
Thomas