To quote the author:
Adding support for Arm FF-A v1.0 (Arm Firmware Framework for Armv8-A) [A].
FF-A specifies interfaces that enable a pair of software execution
environments aka partitions to communicate with each other. A partition
could be a VM in the Normal or Secure world, an application in S-EL0, or
a Trusted OS in S-EL1.
FF-A is a discoverable bus and similar to architecture features.
FF-A bus is discovered using ARM_SMCCC_FEATURES mechanism performed by
the PSCI driver.
=> dm tree
Class Index Probed Driver Name
-----------------------------------------------------------
...
firmware 0 [ + ] psci |-- psci
ffa 0 [ ] arm_ffa | `-- arm_ffa
...
Clients are able to probe then use the FF-A bus by calling the DM class
searching APIs (e.g: uclass_first_device).
This implementation of the specification provides support for Aarch64.
The FF-A driver uses the SMC ABIs defined by the FF-A specification to:
- Discover the presence of secure partitions (SPs) of interest
- Access an SP's service through communication protocols
(e.g: EFI MM communication protocol)
The FF-A support provides the following features:
- Being generic by design and can be used by any Arm 64-bit platform
- FF-A support can be compiled and used without EFI
- Support for SMCCCv1.2 x0-x17 registers
- Support for SMC32 calling convention
- Support for 32-bit and 64-bit FF-A direct messaging
- Support for FF-A MM communication (compatible with EFI boot time)
- Enabling FF-A and MM communication in Corstone1000 platform as a use case
- A Uclass driver providing generic FF-A methods.
- An Arm FF-A device driver providing Arm-specific methods and reusing the Uclass methods.
- A sandbox emulator for Arm FF-A, emulates the FF-A side of the Secure World and provides
FF-A ABIs inspection methods.
- An FF-A sandbox device driver for FF-A communication with the emulated Secure World.
The driver leverages the FF-A Uclass to establish FF-A communication.
- Sandbox FF-A test cases.
- A new command called armffa is provided as an example of how to access the
FF-A bus
For more details about the FF-A support please refer to [B] and refer to [C] for
how to use the armffa command.
Please find at [D] an example of the expected boot logs when enabling
FF-A support for a platform. In this example the platform is
Corstone1000. But it can be any Arm 64-bit platform.
More details:
[A]: https://developer.arm.com/documentation/den0077/latest/
[B]: doc/arch/arm64.ffa.rst
[C]: doc/usage/cmd/armffa.rst
[D]: example of boot logs when enabling FF-A