[PATCH v1 0/3] Meson A1 32-bit support

[Arnd Bergmann]

On Mon, Feb 27, 2023, at 15:28, Dmitry Rokosov wrote:
> Hello Neil!
>
> On Mon, Feb 27, 2023 at 09:15:04AM +0100, neil.armstrong at linaro.org wrote:
>
> [...]
>
>> I'm aware Amlogic also runs their kernel as 32bit to gain a few kbytes
>> of memory, but those processors are ARMv8 and the arm64 arch code
>> has been designed for those CPUs.
>> 
>> So far I didn't find a single good reason to add 32bit support for
>> ARMv8 Amlogic based SoCs, if you have a solid reason please share.
>
> I totally agree with you, but I suppose it's fully related to 'big'
> Amlogic SoC like S905_ or A311_ series. A113L (aka 'a1') is
> a cost-efficient dual-core SoC which is used for small, cheap solutions
> with cheap components. Every cent is important during BoM development.
> That's why usually ODMs install small ROM and RAM capacity, and each
> megabyte is important for RAM/ROM kernel and rootfs footprints.
> Why am I talking about rootfs? For such small projects a good
> choice is buildroot rootfs assembling framework. Unfortunatelly,
> buildroot doesn't support 'compat' mode when kernel and userspace have
> a different bitness. In the internal project, we save several
> percents of ROM/RAM free space using 32-bit configuration (mostly rootfs
> ROM space, to be honest). Therefore, for such 'little' cost-efficient
> SoCs we can make an exception and support 32-bit configuration, from my
> point of view.
>
> What do you think about that?

I would argue that is a problem with buildroot, and using a 32-bit
kernel is not something we should encourage over fixing buildroot
to do it right, or building the kernel separately from the rootfs.

We do allow building support for a couple of ARMv8 SoCs in 32-bit
mode, but that is usually because they ship with a 32-bit bootrom
and cannot actually run a 64-bit kernel.

The overhead of running a 64-bit kernel is usually a few megabytes
compared to a 32-bit kernel, to store the larger kernel .text/.data
segments, per-thread stack and page tables as well as 'page',
and 'inode' structures. I see that A1 only supports DDR3 and DDR4
memory, so I assume that there are always at least 128MB
of total RAM available, or 512MB for the most cost-effective
size with a single memory chip.

My feeling is that for the 256MB configuration, it is very hard to
argue for a 32-bit kernel because of the countless downsides,
and even for the 128MB configuration, I would still try to avoid
it out of principle.

      Arnd