[PATCH] ramips: fix Unifi 6 Lite boot failure with v5.15 kernels

[Bjørn Mork]

Robert Marko <robimarko at gmail.com> writes:

> This is a broken vendor bootloader doing its thing, so we shouldn't
> revert upstream commits
> that is just enforcing the boot specification.
> This was introduced in 5.12 anyway, so most of the broken devices
> should have already surfaced.

Forgot to ack this, but I agree 100%.

If you look at the history in the kernel, you'll see that they wanted
this change to expose already broken code.  The 8-byte alignment
requirement has always been in the spec.  But it was often ignored for
convenience.  There were are lots of different fixes for the real bugs
after this commit was added, so it is considered a success.  We were for
example hit by it on the realtek target, and got a fix into the mainline
MIPS code as a result.

A snowball in hell has better chances than a proposal to revert the
"8-byte alignment is required" commit.

You are right that the bootloader must be fixed.  But the vendor isn't
likely to do that as long as they run older kernels. I believe the
OpenWrt policy in such cases is to try to work around the issue.
Replacing the vendor bootloader is a last resort.  Please correct me if
I'm wrong.


Bjørn