Hi Varun,
Thanks for raising this topic (but please do embrace the official terminology “TF-A”…we never really promoted ATF and it's also absolutely outdated now 😉 ).
Arm has received different queries over time on supporting Trusted Firmware LTS releases, but the effort to sustain them is something that the Arm engineering team alone cannot really afford and commit to (either in the TF-A or TF-M space).
The idea has also been just raised to the Trusted Firmware project Board for initial consideration and we will be all very keen to understand how much interest there is from the wider TF-A community of adopters and external (non-Arm) maintainers, so to evaluate the possibility of a more concrete proposal to be carried on within the community Project.
I guess it will also be good to start by elaborating more concretely on the requirements that you would like to see in an hypothetical LTS versioning scheme.
Thanks Matteo
From: TF-A tf-a-bounces@lists.trustedfirmware.org On Behalf Of Varun Wadekar via TF-A Sent: 10 June 2020 22:47 To: tf-a@lists.trustedfirmware.org Subject: [TF-A] ATF LTS version
Hello team,
To extend the discussion around version upgrades from our last call, I would like to understand if there is enough interest around generating a LTS version of the TF-A to alleviate the pain.
For NVIDIA, this would be helpful as it streamlines the upgrade path for our devices in the field. The LTS version will guarantee security fixes, bug fixes, stability fixes for the longer term and we won’t have to upgrade the entire firmware to get these goodies.
It would be interesting to see what OEMs and maintainers think about this? Has this been discussed at tf.org or Arm internally?
-Varun