When U-Boot started using SPDX tags we were among the early adopters and
there weren't a lot of other examples to borrow from. So we picked the
area of the file that usually had a full license text and replaced it
with an appropriate SPDX-License-Identifier: entry. Since then, the
Linux Kernel has adopted SPDX tags and they place it as the very first
line in a file (except where shebangs are used, then it's second line)
and with slightly different comment styles than us.
In part due to community overlap, in part due to better tag visibility
and in part for other minor reasons, switch over to that style.
This commit changes all instances where we have a single declared
license in the tag as both the before and after are identical in tag
contents. There's also a few places where I found we did not have a tag
and have introduced one.
Signed-off-by: Tom Rini <trini@konsulko.com>
U-Boot has up until now built with -fpic for the MIPS architecture,
producing position independent code which uses indirection through a
global offset table, making relocation fairly straightforward as it
simply involves patching up GOT entries.
Using -fpic does however have some downsides. The biggest of these is
that generated code is bloated in various ways. For example, function
calls are indirected through the GOT & the t9 register:
8f998064 lw t9,-32668(gp)
0320f809 jalr t9
Without -fpic the call is simply:
0f803f01 jal be00fc04 <puts>
This is more compact & faster (due to the lack of the load & the
dependency the jump has on its result). It is also easier to read &
debug because the disassembly shows what function is being called,
rather than just an offset from gp which would then have to be looked up
in the ELF to discover the target function.
Another disadvantage of -fpic is that each function begins with a
sequence to calculate the value of the gp register, for example:
3c1c0004 lui gp,0x4
279c3384 addiu gp,gp,13188
0399e021 addu gp,gp,t9
Without using -fpic this sequence no longer appears at the start of each
function, reducing code size considerably.
This patch switches U-Boot from building with -fpic to building with
-fno-pic, in order to gain the benefits described above. The cost of
this is an extra step during the build process to extract relocation
data from the ELF & write it into a new .rel section in a compact
format, plus the added complexity of dealing with multiple types of
relocation rather than the single type that applied to the GOT. The
benefit is smaller, cleaner, more debuggable code. The relocate_code()
function is reimplemented in C to handle the new relocation scheme,
which also makes it easier to read & debug.
Taking maltael_defconfig as an example the size of u-boot.bin built
using the Codescape MIPS 2016.05-06 toolchain (gcc 4.9.2, binutils
2.24.90) shrinks from 254KiB to 224KiB.
Signed-off-by: Paul Burton <paul.burton@imgtec.com>
Cc: Daniel Schwierzeck <daniel.schwierzeck@gmail.com>
Cc: u-boot@lists.denx.de
Reviewed-by: Daniel Schwierzeck <daniel.schwierzeck@gmail.com>
Tested-by: Daniel Schwierzeck <daniel.schwierzeck@gmail.com>
Tom Rini
Paul Burton