Hello Folks,
I'm emailing to start an open discussion about the adoption of a concept known as "hand-off blocks" or HOB to become a part of the TF-A Firmware Framework Architecture (FFA). This is something that
is a pretty major pain point when it comes to the adoption of TF-A in ARM Server SoC’s designed to enable a broad range of highly configurable datacenter platforms.
What is a HOB (Background)?
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UEFI PI spec describes a particular definition for how HOB may be used for transitioning between the PEI and DXE boot phases, which is a good reference point for this discussion, but not necessarily
the exact solution appropriate for TF-A.
A HOB is simply a dynamically generated data structure passed in between two boot phases. This is information that was obtained through discovery and needs to be passed forward to the next boot phase
*once*, with no API needed to call back (e.g. no call back into previous firmware phase is needed to fetch this information at run-time - it is simply passed one time during boot).
There may be one or more HOBs passed in between boot phases. If there are more than one HOB that needs to be passed, this can be in a form of a "HOB table", which (for example) could be a UUID indexed
array of pointers to HOB structures, used to locate a HOB of interest (based on UUID). In such cases, instead of passing a single HOB, the boot phases may rely on passing the pointer to the HOB table.
This has been extremely useful concept to employ on highly configurable systems that must rely on flexible discovery mechanisms to initialize and boot the system. This is especially helpful when
you have multiple
Why do we need HOBs in TF-A?:
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It is desirable that EL3 firmware (e.g. TF-A) built for ARM Server SoC in a way that is SoC specific *but* platform agnostic. This means that a single ARM SoC that a SiP may deliver to customers
may provide a single TF-A binary (e.g. BL1, BL2, BL31) that could be used to support a broad range of platform designs and configurations in order to boot a platform specific firmware (e.g. BL33 and possibly even BL32 code). In order to achieve this, the
platform configuration must be *discovered* instead of statically compiled as it is today in TF-A via device tree based enumeration. The mechanisms of discovery may differ broadly depending on the relevant industry standard, or in some cases may have rely
on SiP specific discovery flows.
For example: On server systems that support a broad range DIMM memory population/topologies, all the necessary information required to boot is fully discovered via standard JEDEC Serial Presence
Detect (SPD) over an I2C bus. Leveraging the SPD bus, may platform variants could be supported with a single TF-A binary. Not only is this information required to initialize memory in early boot phases (e.g. BL2), the subsequent boot phases will also need
this SPD info to construct a system physical address map and properly initialize the MMU based on the memory present, and where the memory may be present. Subsequent boot phases (e.g. BL33 / UEFI) may need to generate standard firmware tables to the operating
systems, such as SMBIOS tables describing DIMM topology and various ACPI tables (e.g. SLIT, SRAT, even NFIT if NVDIMM's are present).
In short, it all starts with a standardized or vendor specific discovery flow in an early boot stage (e.g. BL1/BL2), followed by the passing of information to the next boot stages (e.g. BL31/BL32/BL33).
Today, every HOB may be a vendor specific structure, but in the future there may be benefit of defining standard HOBs. This may be useful for memory discovery, passing the system physical address
map, enabling TPM measured boot, and potentially many other common HOB use-cases.
It would be extremely beneficial to the datacenter market segment if the TF-A community would adopt this concept of information passing between all boot phases as opposed to rely solely on device
tree enumeration. This is not intended to replace device tree, rather intended as an alternative way to describe the info that must be discovered and dynamically generated.
Conclusion:
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We are proposing that the TF-A community begin pursuing the adoption of HOBs as a mechanism used for information exchange between each boot stage (e.g. BL1->BL2, BL2->BL31, BL31->BL32, and BL31->BL33)?
Longer term we want to explore standardizing some HOB structures for the BL33 phase (e.g. UEFI HOB structures), but initially would like to agree on this being a useful mechanism used to pass information between each boot stage.
Thanks,
--Harb