Hi Andy,

On 5 August 2016 at 08:27, Champ, Andy andycham@amazon.co.uk wrote:

In common/bootm.c there's a function do_bootm_states. Among other things this sets the global variable images->states to the supplied states. If those states include the flag BOOTM_START it then calls a function bootm_start, which then memset-s the whole of state to zero before setting the flag BOOTM_STATE_START.

This code has been there for a few years now, so it obviously doesn't break anything major - but what is it supposed to do?

Andy Champ

Yes I refactoring things a while back to try to reduce duplication and make it easier to understand. It could use another pass. It was added in commit 49c3a861 bootm: Add subcommands).

I suspect that the ->state member is supposed to be used by arch-specific code that wants to know what states have already been passed through. But I don't know as there are no comments. The only user seems to be arch/mips/lib/bootm.c.

I can think of a few options: 1. Remove it, and fix up mips 2. Comment it in the image.h header file (as to what it means and what it is for), and assign it after the BOOTM_START case

Regards, Simon