doc: environment: Further expand on Image locations and provide example

Start by elaborating on what some of our constraints tend to be with
image location values, and document where these external constraints
can come from.  Provide a new subsection, an example based on the TI
ARMv7 OMAP2PLUS families of chips, that gives sample values and explains
why we use these particular values.  This is based on what is in
include/configs/ti_armv7_common.h as of fb3ad9bd923d ("TI: Add, use a
DEFAULT_LINUX_BOOT_ENV environment string") as this contains just the
values referenced in this document now and not some of the further
additions that are less generic.

Cc: Heinrich Schuchardt <xypron.glpk@gmx.de>
Cc: Simon Glass <sjg@chromium.org>
Signed-off-by: Tom Rini <trini@konsulko.com>
Reviewed-by: Heinrich Schuchardt <heinrich.schuchardt@canonical.com>

1 files changed, 53 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/doc/usage/environment.rst b/doc/usage/environment.rst
index 83543f63f6..561076bac9 100644
--- a/doc/usage/environment.rst
+++ b/doc/usage/environment.rst
@@ -404,6 +404,56 @@ device tree blob  fdtfile        fdt_addr_r       fdt_addr
 ramdisk           ramdiskfile    ramdisk_addr_r   ramdisk_addr
 ================= ============== ================ ==============
 
+When setting the RAM addresses for `kernel_addr_r`, `fdt_addr_r` and
+`ramdisk_addr_r` there are several types of constraints to keep in mind. The
+one type of constraint is payload requirement. For example, a device tree MUST
+be loaded at an 8-byte aligned address as that is what the specification
+requires. In a similar manner, the operating system may define restrictions on
+where in memory space payloads can be. This is documented for example in Linux,
+with both the `Booting ARM Linux`_ and `Booting AArch64 Linux`_ documents.
+Finally, there are practical constraints. We do not know the size of a given
+payload a user will use but each payload must not overlap or it will corrupt
+the other payload. A similar problem can happen when a payload ends up being in
+the OS BSS area. For these reasons we need to ensure our default values here
+are both unlikely to lead to failure to boot and sufficiently explained so that
+they can be optimized for boot time or adjusted for smaller memory
+configurations.
+
+On different architectures we will have different constraints. It is important
+that we follow whatever documented requirements are available to best ensure
+forward compatibility. What follows are examples to highlight how to provide
+reasonable default values in different cases.
+
+Texas Instruments OMAP2PLUS (ARMv7) example
+^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
+
+On these families of processors we are on a 32bit ARMv7 core.  As booting some
+form of Linux is our most common payload we will also keep in mind the
+documented requirements for booting that Linux provides.  These values are also
+known to be fine for booting a number of other operating systems (or their
+loaders).  In this example we define the following variables and values::
+
+    loadaddr=0x82000000
+    kernel_addr_r=${loadaddr}
+    fdt_addr_r=0x88000000
+    ramdisk_addr_r=0x88080000
+    bootm_size=0x10000000
+
+The first thing to keep in mind is that DRAM starts at 0x80000000. We set a
+32MiB buffer from the start of memory as our default load address and set
+``kernel_addr_r`` to that. This is because the Linux ``zImage`` decompressor
+will typically then be able to avoid doing a relocation itself. It also MUST be
+within the first 128MiB of memory. The next value is we set ``fdt_addr_r`` to
+be at 128MiB offset from the start of memory. This location is suggested by the
+kernel documentation and is exceedingly unlikely to be overwritten by the
+kernel itself given other architectural constraints.  We then allow for the
+device tree to be up to 512KiB in size before placing the ramdisk in memory. We
+then say that everything should be within the first 256MiB of memory so that
+U-Boot can relocate things as needed to ensure proper alignment. We pick 256MiB
+as our value here because we know there are very few platforms on in this
+family with less memory. It could be as high as 768MiB and still ensure that
+everything would be visible to the kernel, but again we go with what we assume
+is the safest assumption.
 
 Automatically updated variables
 -------------------------------
@@ -472,3 +522,6 @@ Implementation
 --------------
 
 See :doc:`../develop/environment` for internal development details.
+
+.. _`Booting ARM Linux`: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/arm/booting.html
+.. _`Booting AArch64 Linux`: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/arm64/booting.html