Release notes - 2023.04.21

Release tag

The manifest tag for this release is TC2-2023.04.21

Components

The following is a summary of the key software features of the release:

  • BSP build supporting Android and Buildroot distro.

  • Trusted firmware-A for secure boot.

  • U-Boot bootloader.

  • Hafnium for S-EL2 Secure Partition Manager core.

  • OP-TEE for Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) in Buildroot.

  • Trusted Services (Crypto, Internal Trusted Storage and Firmware Update) in Buildroot.

  • Trusty for Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) with FF-A messaging in Android.

  • System control processor(SCP) firmware for programming the interconnect, power control etc.

  • Runtime Security Subsystem (RSS) firmware for providing HW RoT.

Hardware Features

  • Booker CI with Memory Tagging Unit(MTU) support driver in SCP firmware.

  • GIC Clayton Initialization in Trusted Firmware-A.

  • Mali TTIx GPU

  • Mali-D71 DPU and virtual encoder support for display in Linux.

  • MHUv2 Driver for SCP and AP communication.

  • UARTs, Timers, Flash, PIK, Clock drivers.

  • PL180 MMC.

  • DynamIQ Shared Unit (DSU) with 8 cores. 1 Hunter ELP + 3 Hunter + 4 Hayes cores configuration.

  • RSS based on Cortex M55

  • SCP based on Cortex M3

Software Features

  • Buildroot distribution support.

  • Android 13 support.

  • Android Common Kernel 5.15.41

  • Android Hardware Rendering with Mali TTIx GPU - DDK r40p0_01eac0

  • Android Software rendering with DRM Hardware Composer offloading composition to Mali D71 DPU.

  • KVM default mode of operation is set to protected, thus effectively enabling pKVM on the system. This is a nVHE based mode with kernel running at EL1.

  • Microdroid based pVM support in Android

  • GPU and DPU are using S1 translation with SMMU-600

  • Support for MPAM - https://developer.arm.com/documentation/107768/0100/Arm-Memory-System-Resource-Partitioning-and-Monitoring–MPAM–Extension

  • Support for EAS - https://community.arm.com/oss-platforms/w/docs/530/energy-aware-scheduling-eas

  • Trusted Firmware-A v2.8

  • Hafnium v2.7

  • OP-TEE 3.20.0

  • Trusty with FF-A messaging - FF-A v1.0

  • CI700-PMU enabled for profiling

  • Support secure boot based on TBBR specification https://developer.arm.com/documentation/den0006/latest

  • System Control Processor (SCP) firmware v2.11

  • Runtime Security Subsystem (RSS) firmware v1.7.0

  • Build system based on scripts which improves build times compared to Yocto

  • U-Boot bootloader v2022.04

  • Power management features: cpufreq and cpuidle.

  • SCMI (System Control and Management Interface) support.

  • Virtio to mount the android image in the host machine as a storage device in the FVP

  • Verified u-boot for authenticating fit image (containing kernel + ramdisk) during Buildroot boot.

  • Android Verified Boot (AVB) for authenticating boot and system image during Android boot.

  • Hafnium as Secure Partition Manager (SPM) at S-EL2.

  • OP-TEE as Secure Partition at S-EL1, managed by S-EL2 SPMC (Hafnium)

  • Arm FF-A driver and FF-A Transport support for OP-TEE driver in Android Common Kernel.

  • OP-TEE Support in Buildroot distribution. This includes OP-TEE client and OP-TEE test suite.

  • Trusted Services (Crypto, Internal Trusted Storage and Firmware Update) running at S-EL0.

  • Trusted Services test suite added to Buildroot distribution.

  • Tracing - Added support for ETE and TRBE v1.0 in TF-A, kernel and simpleperf. Traces can be captured with simpleperf. However, to enable tracing, the libete plugin has to be loaded while executing the FVP with --plugin <path to plugin>/libete-plugin.so

  • Firmware update support.

Platform Support

  • This software release is tested on TC2 Fast Model platform (FVP) version 11.21.20.

Tools Support

  • This software release introduces docker support (at the moment supporting only the “image building process”).

Known issues or Limitations

  1. At the U-Boot prompt press enter and type “boot” to continue booting else wait for ~15 secs for boot to continue automatically. This is because of the time difference in CPU frequency and FVP operating frequency.

  2. Ubuntu 22.04 is not supported in this release.

  3. SVE2(Scalable Vector Extension) feature is not supported with this release

Support

For support email: support-arch@arm.com

Copyright (c) 2022-2023, Arm Limited. All rights reserved.