TSC April 2020

tsc@lists.trustedfirmware.org

8 participants
13 discussions

Re: [TF-TSC] [EXTERNAL] [TF-M] Project Maintenance Proposal for tf.org Projects

by Shreve, Erik

Sandrine, Really glad to see this being pulled together. A couple of areas of feedback around the Platform Support Life Cycle. As previously mentioned there are two orthogonal concerns captured in the current life cycle: Support and Functionality. I'd like to see these split out. For functionality, chip vendors may not have a business case for supporting all features on a given platform but they may provide full support for the features they have chosen to include. A simple example would be supporting PSA FF Isolation Level 1 only due to lack of HW isolation support needed to achieve Isolation Level 2 or greater. Also, I'd like to see a stronger standard put forth for platform documentation. If a platform is "supported," I believe the documentation should be complete and accurate. A lack of complete and clear documentation leaves open a wide door for misuse/misconfiguration which could result in a vulnerable system. Here is a more concrete proposal: Functional Support: Each project shall provide a standard feature or functionality list. Each platform shall include in its documentation a copy of this list with the supported functionality marked as supported. The platform documentation may reference a ticket if support is planned but not yet present. The platform documentation shall explicitly state if a feature or function has no plans for support. The feature/functionality list shall be versioned, with the version tied to the release version(s) of the project. In this way, it will be clear if a platform was last officially updated for version X but the project is currently at version Y > X. Note: projects will need to adopt (if they have not already) a version scheme that distinguishes between feature updates and bug fixes. Each project and platform shall use tags or similar functionality on tickets to associate tickets to features/functionality and platforms. If the names of tags can't match the name of the feature or platform exactly then a mapping shall be provided in the appropriate document(s). Life Cycle State Fully Supported There is (at least) one active code owner for this platform. All supported features build and either all tests pass or failures are associated with tracked known issues. Other (not associated to a test) Known Issues are tracked Documentation is up to date Note: Projects should document standards on how "active" code ownership is measured and further document standards on how code owners are warned about impending life cycle state changes. Orphan There is no active code owner All supported features build and either all tests pass or failures are associated with tracked known issues. Other (not associated to a test) Known Issues may not have been maintained (as there is no active code owner) Documentation status is unclear since there is no active code owner. There has been no change to the feature/functionality list in the project since the platform was last "Fully Supported" Out of date Same as orphan, but either: there have been changes to the feature/functionality list, or there are failing tests without tracked tickets, or there are known documentation issues. Deprecated Same as Out of Date, but the build is broken. Platform may be removed from the project codebase in the future. Erik Shreve, PSEM Software Security Engineer & Architect (CMCU Platform Development) -----Original Message----- From: TF-M [mailto:tf-m-bounces@lists.trustedfirmware.org] On Behalf Of Sandrine Bailleux via TF-M Sent: Tuesday, March 24, 2020 4:42 AM To: tf-a; tf-m(a)lists.trustedfirmware.org; tsc(a)lists.trustedfirmware.org; op-tee(a)linaro.org Cc: nd(a)arm.com Subject: [EXTERNAL] [TF-M] Project Maintenance Proposal for tf.org Projects Hello all, As the developers community at trustedfirmware.org is growing, there is an increasing need to have work processes that are clearly documented, feel smooth and scale well. We think that there is an opportunity to improve the way the trustedfirmware.org projects are managed today. That's why we are sharing a project maintenance proposal, focusing on the TF-A and TF-M projects initially. The aim of this document is to propose a set of rules, guidelines and processes to try and improve the way we work together as a community today. Note that this is an early draft at this stage. This is put up for further discussion within the trustedfirmware.org community. Nothing is set in stone yet and it is expected to go under change as feedback from the community is incorporated. Please find the initial proposal here: https://developer.trustedfirmware.org/w/collaboration/project-maintenance-p… Please provide any feedback you may have by replying to this email thread, keeping all 4 mailing lists in the recipients list. I will collate comments from the community and try to incorporate them in the document, keeping you updated on changes made between revisions. Regards, Sandrine -- TF-M mailing list TF-M(a)lists.trustedfirmware.org https://lists.trustedfirmware.org/mailman/listinfo/tf-m

4 years, 8 months

Re: [TF-TSC] [TF-A] [TF-M] Project Maintenance Proposal for tf.org Projects

by Sandrine Bailleux

Hi Andrej, On 3/26/20 10:54 AM, Andrej Butok via TF-A wrote: >> But I am worried that a self-review is rarely as good as a peer review > > On practice, unfortunately, some TF-M tasks are waiting weeks and even months for review and following approvals. > If I were a maintainer & owner of my own TFM area, I do not want to wait & push & remind somebody else. > Better to have a post-merge review for these cases, which does not limit and slow down the development. Thanks for the feedback. That's not good, patches can't realistically stay in review for weeks and even months, that's just not workable. Worse, it might discourage developers to contribute to the project. I can see that cumulating maintainer & owner roles would solve the problem here but perhaps enlarging the pool of maintainers would as well? Presumably, the situation is like that today because the current maintainers of the project are overloaded and cannot get all reviews done in a timely manner? I am skeptical about a post-merge review process... Once a patch is merged there is less urge and motivation (if any) for people to take a look at it. I am worried that patches might never get reviewed that way. Regards, Sandrine

4 years, 8 months

Re: [TF-TSC] [TF-M] Project Maintenance Proposal for tf.org Projects

by Christian Daudt

Hi Sandrine, > Please find the initial proposal here: > > https://developer.trustedfirmware.org/w/collaboration/project-maintenance-p… > > Please provide any feedback you may have by replying to this email > thread, keeping all 4 mailing lists in the recipients list. > > I will collate comments from the community and try to incorporate them > in the document, keeping you updated on changes made between revisions. The maintenance proposal looks great ! I have some feedback on specific portions: 1. maintainer/owner/author patches. " Note that roles can be cumulative, in particular the same individual can be both a code owner and a maintainer. In such a scenario, the individual would be able to self-merge a patch solely affecting his module, having the authority to approve it from both a code owner and maintainer's point of view.": I'm always leery of people self-approving their patches. At a minimum, all self-patches should be published and a minimum wait time provided for feedback. Or preferably that another maintainer does the merge (it does not need to be mandated but should be suggested). 2. 'timely manner': This expectation should be more explicit - when the author can start requesting other maintainers to merge on assumption that silence == approval (or not). Such timeliness expectations are probably best set per project however. 3. The proposal does not address branching strategies. i.e. will there be separate maintainers for dev/master/stable branches? I don't think it needs to address it yet - keep it simpler for a start. But a todo saying something like "in the future this project maintenance proposal might be expanded to address multi-branch maintainership" would be good. 4. The platform lifecycle state machine has too many transitions. "Fully maintained" <-> "orphan" -> "out" seems sufficient to me. Thanks, Christian. This message and any attachments may contain confidential information from Cypress or its subsidiaries. If it has been received in error, please advise the sender and immediately delete this message.

4 years, 8 months

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TSC April 2020