Hi Varun,

I guess this suggestion came in response to last weeks Tech Forum discussion from a question about experiences people had from migrating to different TF-A tagged releases. In general we try and keep the tip of Master at tagged release quality through an extensive CI system ran on each patch. I appreciate this CI is currently a little opaque to many contributors as this is still in the process of being transitioned to the OpenCI hosted by Trustedfirmware.org servers which will be visible to all. As mentioned in the recent "Overview of the TF-A v2.3 Release" presentation on https://www.trustedfirmware.org/meetings/tf-a-technical-forum/ the additional testing done for a 6 monthly tagged release is quite minimal and the larger work is ensuring all documentation is up to date. Additionally all new features are generally behind their own build flags but I appreciate it is some work for a tagged release to be absorbed into product offerings.

I asked at the tech forum last week what more we could do to allow releases to be integrated more easily. On the call it was requested if we could disable weak bindings to symbols so it could be more easily seen where platform decisions may need to be made and we will look into this. If there are any more adjustments to the way tagged releases are produced please let us know.

One thing that had been considered briefly was the production of a security bug only branch that was maintained only between 6 month tagged releases before being replaced by the next security bug only branch based on the next 6 month release but that has not progressed very far as a proposal as until your email here it was perceived to not be in demand. A LTS branch is a larger endeavour as it sounds like something that includes more than security fixes and I look forward to you elaborating more as Matteo requests.

Thanks

Joanna

On 11/06/2020, 12:19, "Matteo Carlini via TF-A" tf-a@lists.trustedfirmware.org wrote:

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this topic (but please do embrace the official terminology “TF-A”…we never really promoted ATF and it's also absolutely outdated now 😉 ).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

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