Re: [PATCH] MIPS: generic: Remove undefined image 'ramdisk'

[Thomas Bogendoerfer]

On Tue, Sep 22, 2026 at 08:19:04AM -0700, Jeff Johnson wrote:
> As originally reported by Guenter Roeck [1] and subsequently confirmed by
> me [2], a MIPS allmodconfig build can fail with:
> 
> Error: configuration 'pcb110' references undefined image 'ramdisk' in property 'ramdisk'
> make[3]: *** [../arch/mips/boot/Makefile:173: arch/mips/boot/vmlinux.gz.itb] Error 1
> make[2]: *** [../arch/mips/Makefile:403: vmlinux.gz.itb] Error 2
> 
> Or with:
> 
> Error: configuration 'pcb105' references undefined image 'ramdisk' in property 'ramdisk'
> make[3]: *** [../arch/mips/boot/Makefile:173: arch/mips/boot/vmlinux.gz.itb] Error 1
> make[2]: *** [../arch/mips/Makefile:403: vmlinux.gz.itb] Error 2
> 
> Guenter's original report made the observation that this was triggered by
> an operating system update since he saw the same errors appear on
> previously working kernels after the update.
> 
> I prompted an LLM with the information available and it provided the
> following additional information:
> 
> This is not a kernel bug — it's a mkimage behavior change in u-boot-tools.
> Your system recently received an upgrade from u-boot-tools 2024.01 =>
> 2025.10 (Ubuntu 24.04 noble-security), which included two upstream commits
> from June 2025:
> 
> - tools: mkimage: validate image references in FIT configurations (commit 7a8b25a)
> - tools: mkimage: propagate error codes from fit_handle_file() (commit 21705d3)
> 
> These commits made mkimage strictly validate that every image name
> referenced in a configurations node actually exists in the images section.
> Previously it silently ignored undefined references, now it errors out.
> 
> The offending files in the kernel are arch/mips/generic/board-jaguar2.its.S
> and arch/mips/generic/board-serval.its.S — their configurations reference
> ramdisk = "ramdisk" but no ramdisk image node is ever defined anywhere in the
> FIT source. This was always technically wrong; the new u-boot-tools 2025.10
> just enforces it.
> 
> To fix the issue, remove the stale ramdisk references from both ITS files.
> 
> Assisted-by: LLM
> Reported-by: Guenter Roeck <linux@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Link: https://lore.kernel.org/all/f817c158-412b-4fd1-9941-9c2ff421b91a@xxxxxxxxxxxx/ # [1]
> Reported-by: Jeff Johnson <jeff.johnson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Link: https://lore.kernel.org/all/7eca1c7f-52d5-43bc-afcb-1f6ac198e391@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/ # [2]
> Signed-off-by: Jeff Johnson <jeff.johnson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> ---
>  arch/mips/generic/board-jaguar2.its.S | 2 --
>  arch/mips/generic/board-serval.its.S  | 1 -
>  2 files changed, 3 deletions(-)

applied to mips-next

Thomas.

-- 
Crap can work. Given enough thrust pigs will fly, but it's not necessarily a
good idea.                                                [ RFC1925, 2.3 ]