[TF-A] [RFC] Proposed location to host the firmware handoff specification.

[Dan Handley]

Hi

Just a few comments:

* I agree with Julius that in general it isn't feasible for firmware to refuse to accept a TL with unknown tags. The structures are defined to help with backwards/forwards compatibility. To assume that all firmware is built at the same time is a special case. A particular firmware implementation could have such a policy, but I don't think we can specify this. I like the idea of defining a tag allocation policy but I'm not sure it's a good idea for this to be in the main specification as this could rapidly change depending on how the spec is used in practice. I've commented on the PR to this effect.

* I don't think we’re all going to agree on how we're going to use the TL, which is part of the reason for its existence. At least one of the use-cases is combining the passing of standard structures like FDT/HOBs through to the normal world firmware and/or OS, with the passing of smaller structures between more tightly integrated firmware components. In a system where BL31 (for example) has to parse FDT anyway, it might make sense to put all data in FDT format, but in other systems, BL31 might just relay the FDT, so adding an FDT parser might add unnecessary overhead. I don't think we need to mandate usage for now - patterns will emerge.

* Using TEs throughout is probably only going to work for vertically integrated systems, but that is clearly also an important case, so optimizing the structures for size in those cases is reasonable. I've also commented on the PR about this.

Cheers

Dan.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Simon Glass <sjg at chromium.org>
> Sent: 02 December 2022 17:54
> To: Julius Werner <jwerner at chromium.org>
> Cc: Jose Marinho <Jose.Marinho at arm.com>; tf-a at lists.trustedfirmware.org;
> u-boot at lists.denx.de; boot-architecture at lists.linaro.org; Manish Pandey2
> <Manish.Pandey2 at arm.com>; Joanna Farley <Joanna.Farley at arm.com>;
> Ilias Apalodimas <ilias.apalodimas at linaro.org>; Matteo Carlini
> <Matteo.Carlini at arm.com>; Dan Handley <Dan.Handley at arm.com>; Rob
> Herring <Rob.Herring at arm.com>; Harb Abdulhamid
> (harb at amperecomputing.com) <harb at amperecomputing.com>;
> Sivasakthivel Nainar <snainar at amperecomputing.com>; Samer El-Haj-
> Mahmoud <Samer.El-Haj-Mahmoud at arm.com>; nd <nd at arm.com>
> Subject: Re: [TF-A] [RFC] Proposed location to host the firmware handoff
> specification.
> 
> Hi,
> 
> On Wed, 30 Nov 2022 at 16:48, Julius Werner <jwerner at chromium.org>
> wrote:
> >
> > Okay, FWIW I created a pull request with my suggestions here:
> > https://github.com/FirmwareHandoff/firmware_handoff/pull/4
> >
> > That should make it easier to discuss specific details, hopefully. As
> > I was looking at the header size and format more closely I noticed
> > that the checksum calculation and some details about what the size
> > fields mean seems underspecified right now, so I suggested a change
> > for that as well. Let me know what you think.
> >
> > > One way to enforce that is for firmware components to refuse to
> > > accept a transfer list with unknown tags, assuming that all firmware
> > > is built from source at the same time. It might be a pain, but I
> > > suspect it could help avoid security problems, where bad actors use
> > > the structure to pass code to a firmware blob, etc.
> >
> > I don't think that's feasible, particularly if tag IDs are not
> > allocated in order (which I think is useful so that we can try to
> > group similar tags by vendor, e.g. if say MediaTek wanted to add some
> > tags they could just find some nice round number in the tag space, say
> > 0x200, and then start allocating 0x201, 0x202, 0x203, etc. while the
> > next vendor can do their own thing at 0x300 instead). It also creates
> > automatic incompatibilities if you put newer and older components in
> > the same image, which I think is something we explicitly don't want. I
> > think the right policy to encourage compatibility is that unknown tags
> > just get ignored.
> >
> > > I have to disagree here. The context is gone in this email, so I
> > > cannot reply to the comments there. But I think it was talking about
> > > using the transfer list for very tiny structures, just a few words.
> > > That is not the intent. Firstly we should really have TF-A use the
> > > device tree (embedded in the transfer list) instead of replicating
> > > bl_params in this structure. Secondly, we should group things into a
> > > C structure that is at least 16-32 bytes long.
> >
> > Uhh... okay, sorry, but then you're going against everything that was
> > discussed in this thread and in the previous discussions last year.
> > The whole idea of making this a tagged list came from the argument
> > that other structures (like FDT) are unnecessarily bulky and complex
> > for some of the intended use cases (like replacing TF-A
> > bl_aux_params). I mean, what's the point of even having a transfer
> > list if all it does is wrap an FDT? You could just use the FDT
> > directly! I think all the 4 tags that are currently specified in that
> > document are pathological edge cases that may be necessary for legacy
> > applications but represent the opposite of how this structure *should*
> > be used in the ideal case. We don't need just more wrappers for the
> > stuff that we already have, that doesn't promote interoperability in
> > any way. If project A only wants to use HOBs but not FDT, and project
> > B only wants to use FDT but not HOBs, then creating a transfer list
> > structure that can wrap both an FDT and a HOB in a TE is pointless and
> > not going to fix anything (project A will still not be able to parse
> > the FDT-wrapping TE, and project B will still not be able to parse the
> > HOB-wrapping TE). The only way this whole exercise can actually be
> > useful and improve anything is if we can use it to eventually (slowly)
> > get away from both HOBs and FDTs towards a point where all data is
> > encoded in TEs directly, without any extra layers.
> 
> I don't know where that idea came from and I thought I read the same
> threads. I think FDT is the best data structure in general, because it is self-
> describing, can be understood just by dumping it and we can use schema
> tools to validate things, and many other reasons. Overall, as an industry, I
> believe it is best to get away from ad-hoc binary structures.
> 
> So all projects which need to send or receive complex data should use FDT.
> 
> For replacing bl_aux_params, I think FDT makes sense in general, but there
> may be situations where a few TEs are useful though.
> 
> The point of the transfer list is to deal with cases where we don't have
> enough memory / CPU power to use libfdt. This happens very early in boot,
> and in that case it is helpful to pass small data structures containing useful
> information.
> 
> Actually even just grouping data structures (FDT, ACPI things) in a TL is useful,
> since we have a unified way to find them all.
> 
> I replied on the github PR also.
> 
> >
> > > So I don't see a need for a smaller header. The 16-byte alignment
> > > works well with ACPI tables and we should not be using this
> > > structure for tiny things where the 8-byte overhead is significant.
> >
> > FWIW, the compromise proposal now preserves the 16-byte TE alignment.
> > (8 byte header, then small entries can use the next 8 bytes for data
> > and the whole TE is only 16 bytes with only up to 7 bytes of forced
> > padding. Once you need more than 8 bytes of data it gets a bit more
> > ugly but at that point I guess you're not really a super small entry
> > anymore.)
> 
> I initially thought that was fine, but then I realised that this loses the 16-byte
> alignment of the entries.
> 
> Regards,
> SImon