Hey Sam, Thanks for your reply. First, there was a glitch while bisecting the thing. After all it was this commit: first bad commit: [f382224173ebf8a7fce42cf09179b5f6bc7dc6c9] ARM: scroll past image end without ld_var git log f382224173ebf8a7fce42cf09179b5f6bc7dc6c9 commit f382224173ebf8a7fce42cf09179b5f6bc7dc6c9 (refs/bisect/bad) Author: Sascha Hauer <s.hauer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Date: Tue Mar 13 08:26:21 2018 +0100 ARM: scroll past image end without ld_var ld_var is going to be removed, cope without it. In the PBL image we want to get the location after the binary to the place where the compressed image is located. To do this Put a variable at the very end of the binary, get it's location and add an offset. Signed-off-by: Sascha Hauer <s.hauer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> triggering the boot failure. Note aside: Ironically, the related code is amongst other lines one that matches your description about get_runtime_offset(). BUT.. Turns out, the toolchain wasn't playing along. Using the standard cross-arm- eabihf toolchain arm-linux-gnueabihf-gcc (Ubuntu/Linaro 7.3.0-16ubuntu3) 7.3.0 the above commit triggers this Does-Not-Boot situation. It would just hang once DDR is initialized. However, using the latest OSELAS toolchain provided by pengutronix arm-v7m-eabi-gcc (OSELAS.Toolchain-2018.02.0 7-20180201) 7.3.1 20180201 the boot failure just does not happen and bb v2018.09.0 is booting the rk3188 quite happily: DDR Version 1.04 20140217 In DDR3 300MHz Bus Width=32 Col=10 Bank=8 Row=15 CS=2 Die Bus-Width=16 Size=2048MB Memory OK OUT barebox 2018.09.0 #39 Thu Sep 13 16:53:12 CEST 2018 Board: Radxa Rock clk_register clk xin24m is already registered, skipping! arc-emac 10204000.ethernet: ARC EMAC detected with id: 0x7fd02 mdio_bus: miibus0: probed dw_mmc 10214000.dwmmc: registered as 10214000.dwmmc mshc1: detected SD card version 1.0 mshc1: registered mshc1 netconsole: registered as netconsole-1 i2c-gpio i2c-gpio0: using pins 58 (SDA) and 59 (SCL) malloc space: 0x9fefd660 -> 0xdfdfacbf (size 1023 MiB) gpio-leds.6: probe permanently deferred envfs: no envfs (magic mismatch) - envfs never written? running /env/bin/init... Hit any key to stop autoboot: 3 So, after all, _almost_ everything is fine. barebox@Radxa Rock:/ saveenv saving environment ERROR: dw_mmc 10214000.dwmmc: dwmci_write_data_pio: FIFO overflow timeout ERROR: dw_mmc 10214000.dwmmc: dwmci_write_data_pio: FIFO flush timeout One less to go, yet one to go. cheers S _______________________________________________ barebox mailing list barebox@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.infradead.org/mailman/listinfo/barebox