[PATCH v4 04/20] arm: fdt: Ensure that an embedded fdt is word-aligned

[Albert ARIBAUD]

Hi Simon,

Le 12/01/2012 05:32, Simon Glass a écrit :
> By putting the fdt blob into a distinctive area we can ensure that it appears
> at the start of the data section and is word-aligned.
>
> Note: It does not seem to be possible to get objcopy to honour its
> --section-alignment flag, which would otherwise provide an easier fix
> for this problem.

Stop me if I am wrong, but objcopy obviously works with output sections 
of its input file, not with input ones that this file was linked from, 
and so it cannot act upon alignment of data input sections, right? And 
as, before your patch, there is no designated output section for DTS 
data, it ends up (possibly mis-aligned) in the .data output section 
(which is globally aligned however), so there is no chance anyway that 
objcopy can re-align DTS data if they were mis-aligned.

So I must be missing something. Can you clarify the scenario that gets 
fixed here?

Not that I am against the patch, mind you, quite the opposite. I am just 
wondering about the pros and cons of having a separated (and aligned) 
DTS data *output* section and placing that section after .code and .data 
rather than between them.

Amicalement,
-- 
Albert.