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

Julius Werner jwerner at chromium.org
Tue Dec 6 05:18:00 CET 2022


It seems like some of us still have very different opinions about how
this handoff structure should and shouldn't be used, which I really
think need to be worked out and then codified in the spec before we
can call the document final, because otherwise no firmware project can
trust that it is safe to adopt this. My understanding was that this is
supposed to be a universal handoff structure that's free to be used by
any open source firmware project for any of its internal purposes at
any stage of the boot flow as a standalone solution that doesn't force
them to pull in dependencies to any other format. If that is the case
then I think the spec should reflect this very clearly and should
particularly not contain any language about deferring certain types of
data to other handoff structures wrapped in the TL. It needs to be
clear that projects will be allowed to freely register tags for their
needs without the risk of suddenly getting told by the maintainers
that they need to use an FDT for this or that instead.

On the other hand, if this is just supposed to be an early boot flow
extension to FDTs, then that's very different from what I understood
the goal to be and then I think the text of the spec should be honest
about that front and center. In that case, I wouldn't expect much
adoption beyond the ecosystem that's already deeply tied to FDT to
begin with, though, and that would be far from "universal".


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