Added LTS patch automation doc: https://developer.trustedfirmware.org/w/tf_a/tf-a_lts_meeting_minutes/tf-a_lts_patch_automation/

Further improvement to tf-a-tests added to this ticket

added more improvement suggestions

Hi Andre-ARM, to fix the problem, here's the pull request: https://github.com/ARM-software/arm-trusted-firmware/pull/1988

In T1003#11851, @Andre-ARM wrote:

Hi,
thanks for the info, I will have a look at this, though probably only later this week.
As for rebuilding: I assume you are using the firmware drops from the pftf github?
This is deeply hidden in the EDK2 build system, but it will effectively use a precompiled version of bl31.bin checked into the edk2-non-osi.git repository. This will be placed into the first 128KB of RPI_EFI.fd file, filled up with 0xff.
So to replace just bl31.bin, you simply overwrite the first part of that file, with your compiled version.
To get bl31.bin from source, you just need an aarch64 (cross-)compiler, then:
$ CROSS_COMPILE=aarch64-linux-gnu- make PLAT=rpi4 DEBUG=0
This should be described in docs/plat/rpi4.rst. If you find something missing, let me know, or even better: send a patch ;-)

Hi,
thanks for the info, I will have a look at this, though probably only later this week.
As for rebuilding: I assume you are using the firmware drops from the pftf github?
This is deeply hidden in the EDK2 build system, but it will effectively use a precompiled version of bl31.bin checked into the edk2-non-osi.git repository. This will be placed into the first 128KB of RPI_EFI.fd file, filled up with 0xff.
So to replace just bl31.bin, you simply overwrite the first part of that file, with your compiled version.
To get bl31.bin from source, you just need an aarch64 (cross-)compiler, then:
$ CROSS_COMPILE=aarch64-linux-gnu- make PLAT=rpi4 DEBUG=0
This should be described in docs/plat/rpi4.rst. If you find something missing, let me know, or even better: send a patch ;-)

In T1003#11849, @Andre-ARM wrote:

So that's a lot of details (thanks for that!), but what is the actual problem? That secondaries cannot be taken offline? Or that they don't came back online? And did that work before the commit you mentioned?

So that's a lot of details (thanks for that!), but what is the actual problem? That secondaries cannot be taken offline? Or that they don't came back online? And did that work before the commit you mentioned?

I can confirm this occurs with binutils 2.39. We (coreboot) are trying to update binutils from our toolchain and we are about to adjust our build system. --no-warn-rwx-segment fixes the issue. https://review.coreboot.org/c/coreboot/+/66920

Pinging @Andre-ARM RPi4 platform code owner for comment.

Hello Olivier,

Thanks for your reply. Looks like there is a fix under works:

Adding that the linking warns about both rwx-sections and execstack for bl2 too.
So both are needed or the linking needs to be fixed.
I think the no-warn flags are only available to newer tools, so defaulting to them will probably break things.

Hello Olivier,

Hi,
From the logs I understand BL31 is started by U-Boot SPL rather than TF-A's BL1/BL2, correct?
Would it be possible to gather more verbose logs (build with DEBUG=1 LOG_LEVEL=50) ?
Can you share the TF-A command line used to build this platform?
In particular what's the state of EL3_EXCEPTION_HANDLING, SPD, SPMD_SPM_AT_SEL2 toggles?
Thanks, Olivier.

Ping @raghuncstate for comment https://git.trustedfirmware.org/TF-A/trusted-firmware-a.git/commit/?id=7c2fe62f1347bb94d82e9fdd3bc5eaebedaf0bc7

Hey Chris, I may have raised the bug wrong we are tracking internally as its binutils-2.39, sorry!

Hi Heitbaum, could you tell me which toolchain you're using to build TF-A? The latest Arm GNU AArch64 toolchain is 11.3.Rel1, which packages binutils-2.38 and therefore compiles successfully, so I'm currently unable to reproduce this error.

I see. Thanks for the replies. Feel free to close this task then.

Regarding this web page reporting system its mainly now being used for Bug reporting. There is now a TF-A mailing list https://lists.trustedfirmware.org/mailman3/lists/tf-a.lists.trustedfirmware.org/ where many more people can help with questions.

Yes, this is a known issue. The DTs for the base FVP model were once imported from the Linux tree, but haven't been updated since. Meanwhile both DTC and the DT schema compliance tooling in the kernel tree got stricter, so the old files trigger warnings now.
One could go ahead and just fix each of those warnings, but I am actually working on rearranging the FVP DT files, so we can sync them from the kernel tree. That should fix those messages automatically.

I tried to follow the guidelines on https://github.com/ARM-software/tf-issues but I can't find where to add the "question" label. Sorry about this.

Hi Heitaum, Thanks for reporting this.

Sure, people are of course free to do what they want downstream. Especially as a temporary measure if this is ultimately needed to be upstreamed with fuller discussion once other stakeholders are available to facilitate that.

Thanks Joanna for letting know. This is actually blocking development so I'm thinking we go ahead with a local change that we think will be best and then we can discuss that change when Soby is back. What do you think?

Soby, himself is out until towards end of August. Maybe wait now until Beginning of Septif this is not urgent?

Apologies, holiday delays on our side too :)