Hi All,

We are pleased to announce the formal release of Trusted Firmware-A version 2.9 bundle of project deliverables.

This includes Trusted Firmware-A, Trusted Firmware-A Tests, Hafnium  and TF-A OpenCI Scripts/Jobs 2.9 releases involving the tagging of multiple repositories. Aligned but not yet part of the release is Trusted Firmware-A Realm Management Monitor v0.3.0.

These went live on 23^rd May 2023.

I would like to thank all of the contributors for their excellent work and achievements since the last release. 

Thanks Joanna

Notable Features of the Version 2.9 Release are as follows: 

TF-A/EL3 Root World

• New Features:
• Support for PSCI OS initiated mode
• Architecture feature support for FEAT_TCR2, FEAT_GCS, FEAT_HCX, FEAT_SME2, FEAT_PIE/POR, FEAT_MPAM.
• System registers access trap handler
• Introduction to dynamic detection of features
• Refactoring:
• Context management
• RAS extension exception handling and crash reporting.
• Distinguish between BL2 as TF-A entry point or BL2 running at EL3 exception level.
• General Support
• CPU Support for Chaberton and Blackhawk for TC2023
• Eighteen (18) Errata Mitigations for Cortex X2/X3/A710/A510/A78/A78C and Neoverse N2/V1 family CPU’S
• Errata Management Firmware Interface implementation supported for version 1.0 of the public specification

TF-A Boot BL1/BL2

• New Feature/Support
• Support for Trusted Boot rooted into RSS RoT on TC2022 platform.
• Support for PSA attestation scheme with Measured Boot rooted into RSS on TC2022 platform
• Migration to mbedTLS 3.x as the default cryptography library retaining backwards compatibility with mbedTLS 2.x
• Improvements and hardening of Arm CCA boot and attestation support.
• Hardening efforts in the X.509 certificate parser, including a security fix (TFV-10 CVE-2022-47630)

Hafnium/SEL2 SPM

• FF-A v1.2 ALP0 Specification Early Adoption Support
• Implemented ppartition info get ABI using GP registers.
• Group0 secure interrupt handling delegation.
• Improved console log ABI.
• FF-A v1.1 REL0 Specification Support
• Interrupt handling (S-EL0 partition signalling, added action to Other-S-Int, allow a physical interrupt to be routed to a specified PE).
• Memory sharing (structures updates supporting FF-A backwards compatibility, share/lend/donate memory to multiple borrowers, normal/secure fragmented memory sharing).
• Power management (events relayed to the SPMC and removed limitations).
• Indirect messaging (buffer synchronization and ownership transfer rules).
• General Support
• SPMC manifest to declare non-secure and secure system memory address ranges.
• Hardened SP manifest memory regions boot time validation.
• CI migration to LLVM/clang 15.0.6
• Removal of non-VHE build and test configurations.
• Added EL3 SPMC test configurations using the Hafnium's CI infrastructure.

TF-A Tests

• New Test Support
• Errata Management Firmware Interface testing
• FF-A v1.1 feature testing
• Realm Management Extension feature testing
• New Architecture Specific feature testing related to v8.8
• 1 new platform port (RD-N2-Cfg3)

TF-RMM/REL2

• New Feature/Support
• Added support to create Realms which can make use of SVE, if present in hardware.
• Refactor and improved the Stage 1 translation table library lib/xlat API to better fit RMM usage. 
• Add PMU support for Realms as described by RMM v1.0 Beta0 specification.
• Support getting DRAM info from the Boot manifest dynamically at runtime.
• RMM can now support the 2nd DDR bank on FVP
• Define a unit test framework using CppUTest for RMM.
• Added unit tests for granule, slot-buffer and Stage 1 translation table lib xlat.
• Improvements to fake-host and unit tests framework.
• Build improvements in RMM

Platform Support

• 1 new platform added, the Allwinner T507 SoC
• 26 platforms updated from 14 providers
• 17 different driver updates

OpenCI

• First release done solely relying on Trustedfirmware.org OpenCI

Patch Statistics Across all Repositories

• 1403 Patches merged since v2.8 November 2022 release

Please refer to the TF-A [1], Hafnium [2] and TF-A Tests [3] changelogs for the complete summary of changes from the previous release. 

TF-A [4], TF-A Test [5], Hafnium [6], TF-A OpenCI Scripts [7] and TF-A OpenCI Jobs [8] repositories are available along with the compatible TF-RMM repository [9] and changelog [10].

[1] https://trustedfirmware-a.readthedocs.io/en/v2.9/change-log.html#id1

[2] https://review.trustedfirmware.org/plugins/gitiles/hafnium/hafnium/+/HEAD/docs/ChangeLog.md

[3] https://trustedfirmware-a-tests.readthedocs.io/en/v2.9/change-log.html#version-2-9

[4] https://git.trustedfirmware.org/TF-A/trusted-firmware-a.git/tag/?h=v2.9

[5] https://git.trustedfirmware.org/TF-A/tf-a-tests.git/tag/?h=v2.9

[6] https://git.trustedfirmware.org/hafnium/hafnium.git/tag/?h=v2.9

[7] https://git.trustedfirmware.org/ci/tf-a-ci-scripts.git/tag/?h=v2.9

[8] https://git.trustedfirmware.org/ci/tf-a-job-configs.git/tag/?h=v2.9

[9] https://git.trustedfirmware.org/TF-RMM/tf-rmm.git/tag/?h=tf-rmm-v0.3.0

[10] https://tf-rmm.readthedocs.io/en/tf-rmm-v0.3.0/about/change-log.html#v0-3-0