Hi,
Arm worked to draft a firmware handoff [1] specification, evolving it based on community feedback.
This activity followed the request of some members of the Arm ecosystem [2].
The spec (still at ALP – feedback/comments welcome!) standardizes how information is propagated between different firmware components during boot.
The spec hopes to remove the reliance on bespoke/platform-specific information handoff mechanisms, thus reducing the code maintenance burden.
The concept of entry types is present in the spec – these are data structure layouts that carry a specific type of data.
New types are meant to be added, following the needs and use-cases of the different communities.
Thus, these communities should be empowered to request new types!
To enable community contributions, the specification must be hosted in a location that is friendly to change requests.
We propose to host the spec in trustedfirmware.org (tf.org).
Tf.org hosts several open-source projects and already has an open governance model.
TF-A, and the associated community, rely on tf.org, and thus are already well equipped to maintain this specification and keep it up to date.
Tf.org is agnostic of any downstream projects that would adopt this specification (e.g. U-boot, EDK2, etc.).
We welcome the views of the communities and want to understand if there are any strong objections to what’s being proposed!
If anyone has objections, we are happy to consider alternatives and associated trade-offs.
Regards
[1] https://developer.arm.com/documentation/den0135/latest
[2] Re: [TF-A] Proposal: TF-A to adopt hand-off blocks (HOBs) for information passing between boot stages - TF-A - lists.trustedfirmware.org<https://lists.trustedfirmware.org/archives/list/tf-a@lists.trustedfirmware.…>
Hi all
Just picking up this old thread again...
There seemed to be general agreement to host the firmware hand-off spec in a separate repo with separate maintainers at TrustedFirmware.org, at least initially. Arm intends to progress with the initial population of this repo. We intend to use the CC-BY-SA-4.0 (https://spdx.org/licenses/CC-BY-SA-4.0.html) license, the same as used for EBBR (https://github.com/ARM-software/ebbr). Please say if you have any objections to this. We will also seek approval from the TrustedFirmware.org board.
Regards
Dan.
All,
There will be a DT call today. For the US it will occur 1 hour later
than normal due to UK timezone shift. It will be back to normal on Nov 14.
(But you all must have figured that out as there is no one on zoom right
now.)
Thanks,
Bill
--
Bill Mills
Principal Technical Consultant, Linaro
+1-240-643-0836
TZ: US Eastern
Work Schedule: Tues/Wed/Thur
Hi,
We do not have an agenda for the EBBR today's call[1] for the moment. Let's wait
until noon (UTC) for people to propose topics, then I think we can skip this
call.
Best regards,
Vincent Stehlé
System Architect - Arm
[1]: https://github.com/ARM-software/ebbr/wiki/EBBR-Meetings
All,
Sorry of the late notice but I will not be able to host this meeting today.
Thanks,
Bill
--
Bill Mills
Principal Technical Consultant, Linaro
+1-240-643-0836
TZ: US Eastern
Work Schedule: Tues/Wed/Thur
Dear boot architecture community,
and in particular the people involved with System Device Tree,
The hypervisor portability tiger team of the SOAFEE group (Arm initiated automotive group) is going to have a kick off meeting as per the below invitation to discuss how to make device assignment with type-1 hypervisors much simpler for the hypervisor vendors and for the product makers. Attendees range from car OEM, Tier'1s, hypervisor providers (open source or commercial), silicon providers.
There are great chances that a solution will rely on System Device Tree. For instance we expect that the planned SCMI information introduction will allow to get just enough information to understand clock dependencies aspect of the device assignment.
We would greatly appreciate your active contributions.
Should you want to attend, you have all the information below to connect. Please contact me to be added to the formal invite roaster.
Cordially
Francois-Frederic
De : François Ozog <francois.ozog(a)soafee.io>
Date : mardi 11 octobre 2022 à 11:39
À : "tsc(a)soafee.io" <tsc(a)soafee.io>
Cc : Matt Spencer <Matt.Spencer(a)arm.com>, Robert Day <Robert.Day(a)arm.com>, "Estela Rey Ramos (via Google Docs)" <estela.reyramos(a)soafee.io>
Objet : [SOAFEE] Hypervisor Portability tiger team meeting
Hi,
As per the Doodle, the best date to organize the meeting on device assignment is on October 31st , 6pm-7pm CET.
There will be additional meetings and this one should be considered as the kickoff, and I will trim the distribution list shortly after this first instance.
You should have received the calendar invite in parallel on this mail.
The meeting link is: https://meet.google.com/vkj-zzue-vqb
I created an open folder to share your contributions on the topic:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1KD4mySbduyN4BFRfpPNj7cOZxeJpRzDg?us…
You may want to drop here a few notes about what problems you faced and how they may be resolved. Those contributions can be in any or multiple forms (you can post a document and or a presentation to share during the meeting). I’ll post some later this week.
Cordially,
FF
PS: sorry to spam you with both a calendar invite and a mail.
[resend from correct email this time.]
All,
On yesterday's call we brainstormed about what topics we want to talk
about on this call going forward. We also said we will continue with
the bi-weekly cadence for a few meetings and then reassess if we should
go monthly instead.
Attending:
* Loic
* Mark
* Etienne
* Arnaud
* Rob
* Ilias
* Bill
* Joakim
Here is the topic list in no specific order:
* New DT format
* Overlays in kernel
* overlays for PCI or USB devices (in an ACPI based system)
* DT for other OSes
* Zephyr DT schema conformance
* ABI stability & testing
* source code sync
* U-boot DT handling
We discussed the ABI issue a bit:
Rob: SystemReady IR 2.0 requires schema conformance
* There are still open questions
+ what version of schema
+ how many warnings allowed
* discussion mostly inside ARM
* 2.0 will come out this fall
Bill: But you can have two DTBs that full conform to schema and are
still ABI breaking
* Example: ST moving from direct kernel Power/clk control to SCMI
* Current recommendation from this group is make new kernels work both
ways until all firmware will have been updated
* The switch over time could be a couple of years for a GP platform.
Loic: It is very difficult to make a kernel that works both ways
* Not all customers see the benefit, (mostly security)
* Some want to keep doing things the old way
Bill: Even if everyone agrees to switch the transition period is hard to
handle in anything except a vertical OS.
We discussed recent status of U-boot DT handling a bit but need a more
structured discussion / investigation.
Bill
--
Bill Mills
Principal Technical Consultant, Linaro
+1-240-643-0836
TZ: US Eastern
Work Schedule: Tues/Wed/Thur
All,
This is to confirm that we will have a meeting today at 2pm UTC, 10 am
US Eastern, which is about 30 min from now.
It has been a good number of months since we meet.
I want to collect topics and we can catch up on what has been happening.
Thanks,
Bill
--
Bill Mills
Principal Technical Consultant, Linaro
+1-240-643-0836
TZ: US Eastern
Work Schedule: Tues/Wed/Thur
