Hi Arnd, On Tue, 7 Sept 2021 at 20:52, Arnd Bergmann <arnd@xxxxxxxx> wrote: > > Off-topic but related: Another MediaTek spin off, SigmaStar, seems to > > have done exactly the same thing. Cortex A53 chip running as a 32bit > > system to avoid having to fix their software. I'm interested to see if > > this makes it into arm or arm64. :) > > Maybe it's best to just add them to both at the same time? The boot > loader situation might take a bit to work out, but in theory this should > be fixable. I wonder how fixable it would be.. I haven't gotten a board with the chip in question (SSD268G) yet but from looking at some firmware binaries I can see that even u-boot is a 6 year old 32bit version. As far as I can tell there's no PSCI, ATF etc that I think would be expected for an arm64 machine. I think the broken memory controller is still there so somehow I'd need to get the heavy barrier to work in arm64. I haven't yet worked out if that's even possible. I think they are advertising that it supports up to 2GB of DDR. So it's a hobbled 64bit capable system with highmem. Putting most of the DT bits under arm64 even though it's so broken it'll only ever boot a 32bit kernel makes sense to me. Better than having lots of arm64 typical stuff like a newer GIC in a file under arm and confusing everyone that comes across it. Cheers, Daniel
