Change Log & Release Notes

Please note that the Trusted Firmware-A Tests version follows the Trusted Firmware-A version for simplicity. At any point in time, TF-A Tests version x.y aims at testing TF-A version x.y. Different versions of TF-A and TF-A Tests are not guaranteed to be compatible. This also means that a version upgrade on the TF-A-Tests side might not necessarily introduce any new feature.

Version 2.6

New features

  • More tests are made available in this release to help validate the functionalities in the following areas:

    • Firmware Framework for Arm A-profile(FF-A)

    • Realm Management Extensions(RME)

    • Embedded Trace Extension and Trace Buffer Extension (ETE and TRBE)

TFTF

  • FF-A testing:

    • Update FF-A version to v1.1

    • Added helpers for SPM tests to check partition info of SPs from normal world.

    • Added tests to check for ffa_features supported.

    • Added test for FFA_RXTX_UNMAP ABI.

    • Added test for FFA_SPM_ID_GET.

    • FF-A v1.1 Notifications

      • Added test for notifications bitmap create and destroy ABIs.

      • Added test for notifications set and get ABIs.

      • Added test for notification INFO_GET ABI.

      • Added test to check notifications pending interrupt is injected into and handled by the expected vCPU in a MP setup.

      • Added test for signaling from MP SP to UP SP.

      • Added test to check notifications interrupt IDs retrieved with FFA_FEATURES ABI.

      • Added test to check functionality of notifications scheduled receiver interrupt.

    • FF-A v1.1 Secure interrupts

      • Added support for handling secure interrupts in Cactus SP.

      • Added several tests to exercise secure interrupt handling while SP is in WAITING/RUNNING/BLOCKED state.

  • New tests:

    • Enabled SVE tests

    • Added test for trace system registers access.

    • Added test for trace filter control registers access.

    • Added test for trace buffer control registers access.

    • Added test to check PSTATE in SDEI handler.

    • Added test to check if HCRX_EL2 is accessible.

  • Platforms:

    • TC0:

      • Support for direct messaging with managed exit.

      • Support for building S-EL0 Ivy partition.

    • FVP:

      • Update Cactus secure partitions to indicate Managed exit support.

  • Miscellaneous

    • Added random seed generation capability and ability to specify build parameters for SMC Fuzzer tool.

Cactus (Secure-EL1 test partition)

  • Added helper for Cactus SP sleep.

  • Added test commands to request use of notifications interfaces.

  • Added several commands that generate direct message requests to assist in testing secure interrupt handling and notifications features in FF-A v1.1

  • Added support for SP805 Trusted Watchdog module.

Ivy (Secure-EL1 test partition)

  • Add shim layer to Ivy partition and enable PIE.

  • Define Ivy partition manifest and use FF-A for message handling.

  • Prepare S-EL1/0 enviroment for enabling S-EL0 application.

Realm Management Extension(RME)

  • Added tests to run RMI and SPM on multiple CPUs concurrently.

  • Added tests for multi CPU delegation and fail conditions.

  • Added tests to query RMI version on multiple CPUs.

Issues resolved since last release

  • Fixed Ivy partition start address for TC0.

  • Fixed SP manifests to use little endian format UUID.

  • Fixed a bug in memory sharing test for Cactus SP.

  • Invalidate data cache for NS_BL1U and NS_BL2U images.

  • Fixed attributes to Read-Write only for memory regions described in partition manifests.

Version 2.5

New features

  • More tests are made available in this release to help validate the functionalities in the following areas:

    • True Random Number Generator (TRNG) test scenarios.

    • Multicore / Power State Controller Interface (PSCI) tests.

    • v8.6 Activity Monitors Unit (AMU) enhancements test scenarios.

    • Secure Partition Manager (SPM) / Firmware Framework (FF-A) v1.0 testing.

      • Interrupt Handling between Non-secure and Secure world.

      • Direct messages and memory sharing between Secure Partitions(SP).

      • Many tests to exercise FF-A v1.0 ABIs.

      • SPM saving/restoring the NS SIMD context enabling a normal world FF-A endpoint (TFTF) and a secure partition to use SIMD vectors and instructions independently.

TFTF

  • SPM / FF-A v1.0 testing.
    • Refactor FF-A memory sharing tests

      • Created helper functions to initialize ffa_memory_region and to send the respective memory region to the SP, making it possible to reuse the logic in SP-to-SP memory share tests.

      • Added comments to document relevant aspects about memory sharing.

    • Trigger direct messaging between SPs.

      • Use cactus command ‘CACTUS_REQ_ECHO_SEND_CMD’ to make cactus SPs communicate with each other using direct message interfaces.

    • Added helpers for SPM tests.

      • Checking SPMC has expected FFA_VERSION.

      • Checking that expected FF-A endpoints are deployed in the system.

      • Getting global TFTF mailbox.

  • Replace ‘.inst’ AArch64 machine directives with CPU Memory Tagging Extension instructions in ‘test_mte_instructions’ function.

  • Add build option for Arm Feature Modifiers.

    • This patch adds a new ARM_ARCH_FEATURE build option to add support for compiler’s feature modifiers.

  • Enable 8 cores support for Theodul DSU(DynamIQ Shared Unit) for the Total Compute (TC0) platform.

  • New tests:

    • Remove redundant code and add better tests for TRNG SMCs.

      • Tests that the Version, Features, and RND calls conform to the spec.

    • New tests for v8.6 AMU enhancements (FEAT_AMUv1p1)

      • Make sure AMU offsets are being saved and restored properly.

    • Tests to request SP-to-SP memory share.

    • SP-to-SP direct messaging deadlock test.

      • TFTF sends CACTUS_REQ_DEADLOCK_CMD to cactus SP.

Cactus(Secure-EL1 test partition)

  • Enable managed exit for primary cactus secure partition.

  • Helper commands needed for interrupt testing.

  • Add handler from managed exit FIQ interrupt.

  • Make ffa_id global.

  • Implement HF_INTERRUPT_ENABLE Hafnium hypervisor call wrapper. With this service, a secure partition calls into the SPMC to enable/disable a particular virtual interrupt.

  • Invalidate the data cache for the cactus image.

  • Helper commands needed for interrupt testing.

    • CACTUS_SLEEP_CMD & CACTUS_INTERRUPT_CMD added.

  • Decouple exception handling from tftf framework.

    • With new interrupt related tests coming up in Cactus, added separate exception handler code for irq/fiq in Cactus.

  • Hypervisor calls moved to a separate module.

  • Add secondary entry point register function.

  • Declare third SP instance as UP SP.

  • Provision a cold boot path for secondary cores (or secondary pinned execution contexts).

  • Tidy message loop, commands definitions, direct messaging API definitions.

  • Helpers for error logging after FF-A calls.

  • Properly placing Cactus test files.

  • Tidying FF-A Memory Sharing tests.

  • Use CACTUS_ECHO_CMD in direct message tests.

  • Refactor handling of commands.

    • Added helper macros to define a command handler, build a command table in which each element is a pair of the handler and respective command ID. Available tests have been moved to their own command handler.

  • Extend arguments in commands responses.

    • In the test commands framework, added template to extend number of values to include in a command response.

  • Check FF-A return is a valid direct response.

    • Added a helper function to check if return of FFA_MSG_SEND_DIRECT_REQ is FFA_MSG_SEND_DIRECT_RESP.

  • FFA_MSG_DIRECT_RESP call extended to use 5 registers.

  • Added accessors for arguments from FF-A calls.

    • Some accessors for arguments from FF-A calls, namely for func id, error code, and direct message destination/source.

  • Use virtual counter for sp_sleep.

    • Changes sp_sleep() to use virtual counter instead of physical counter.

  • Checks if SIMD vectors are preserved in the normal world while transitioning from normal world to secure world and back to normal world.

  • Tidying common code to tftf and cactus.

  • Refactor cactus_test_cmds.h to incorporate static inline functions instead of macros to enforce type checking.

  • Removed reference to Hafnium in name from helper function and macro to make them generic.

  • For consistency added the cmd id ‘CACTUS_MEM_SEND_CMD’.

  • Add command to request memory sharing between SPs.

  • Add & handle commands ‘CACTUS_REQ_ECHO_CMD’ and ‘CACTUS_ECHO_CMD’.

  • Update README with list of sample partitions.

  • Remove reference to PSA from xml test file.

  • Reduce tests verbosity in release mode.

    • Update few NOTICE messages to VERBOSE/INFO.

  • Fix conversion issues on cactus responses.

  • Create RXTX map/configure helper macros and use them.

  • Update OP-TEE version used for testing to 3.10.

    • SPMC as S-EL1 tests using OP-TEE depend on a static binary stored as a CI file. This binary corresponds to a build of OP-TEE v3.10.

  • Add uart2 to device-regions node.

    • First SP no longer has an open access to the full system peripheral range and devices must be explicitly declared in the SP manifest.

  • New tests:

    • Test for exercising SMMUv3 driver to perform stage2 translation.

    • Test handling of non-secure interrupt while running SP.

    • Add secondary cores direct messaging test for SPM.

    • Testing deadlock by FF-A direct message.

      • Added command CACTUS_DEADLOCK_CMD to file cactus_test_cmds.h to create a deadlock scenario using FF-A direct message interfaces.

    • Test SP-to-SP memory share operations

      • Handle ‘CACTUS_REQ_MEM_SEND_CMD’ by sending memory to the receiver SP.

    • Implemented test to validate FFA_RXTX_MAP ABI.

Version 2.4

New features

  • More tests are made available in this release to help validate the functionalities in the following areas: - SMCCC. - New architecture specific features. - FF-A features. - New platform ports.

  • Various improvements to test framework and test suite such as documentation, removing un-necessary dependencies, etc.

TFTF

  • Remove dependencies from FVP to generic code by converting some FVP platform specific macros to the common macros.

  • Remove make as a package dependency to compile TF-A test code.

  • Move defaults values and macro defs in a separate folder from Makefile.

  • Allow alternate stdout to be used apart from pl011 UART.

  • Get FVP platform’s topology from build options to make FVP platform configuration more flexible and eliminate test errors when the platform is configured with number of CPUs less than default values in the makefile.

  • Update the FIP corrupt address which is used to corrupt BL2 image that helps to trigger firmware update process.

  • Add explicit barrier before sev() in tftf_send_event_common API to avoid core hang.

  • Align output properly on issuing make help_tests by removing dashes and sort tests.

  • Moved a few FVP and Juno specific defined from common header files to platform specific header files.

  • Replace SPCI with PSA FF-A in code as SPCI is now called as FF-A.

  • Add owner field to sp_layout generation to differentiate owner of SP which could either be Silicon Provider or Platform provider.

  • Add v8.5 Branch Target Identifier(BTI) support in TFTF.

  • Remove dependency on SYS_CNT_BASE1 to read the memory mapped timers.

  • Enables SError aborts for all CPUs, during their power on sequence.

  • Documentation:

    • Use conditional assignment on sphinx variables so that they can be overwritten by environment and/or command line.

    • Add support for documentation build as a target in Makefile.

    • Update list of maintainers.

    • Update documentation to explain how to locally build the documentation.

    • Add .editorconfig from TF-A to define the coding style.

    • Fix documentation to include ‘path/to’ prefix when specifying tftf.bin on make fip cmd.

    • Use docker to build documentation.

    • Replace SPCI with PSA FF-A in documentation as SPCI is now called as FF-A.

  • NVIDIA Tegra194:

    • Skip CPU suspend tests requiring SGI as wake source as Tegra194 platforms do not support CPU suspend power down and cannot be woken up with an SGI.

    • Disable some system suspend test cases.

    • Create dummy SMMU context for system resume to allow the System Resume Firmware to complete without any errors or warnings.

    • Increase RTC step value to 5ms as RTC consumes 250us for each register read/write. Increase the step value to 5ms to cover all the register read/write in program_timer().

    • Skip some timer framework validation tests as CPUs on Tegra194 platforms cannot be woken up with the RTC timer interrupt after power off.

    • Introduce per-CPU Hypervisor Timer Interrupt ID.

    • Skip PSCI STAT tests requiring PSTATE_TYPE_POWERDOWN as Tegra194 platforms do not support CPU suspend with state type as PSTATE_TYPE_POWERDOWN.

    • Disable boot requirement tests as Tegra194 platforms do not support memory mapped timers.

    • Skips the test “Create all power states and validate EL3 power state parsing” from the “EL3 power state parser validation” test suite as it is not in sync with this expectation.

    • Moved reset, timers. wake, watchdog drivers from Tegra194 specific folder to common driver folder so that these drivers can be used for other NVIDIA platforms.

  • New tests:

    • Add test for SDEI RM_ANY routing mode.

    • Add initial platform support for TC0.

    • Add SMC fuzzing module test.

    • Add test case for SMCCC_ARCH_SOC_ID feature.

    • Add test that supports ARMv8.6-FGT in TF-A.

    • Add test that supports ARMv8.6-ECV in TF-A.

    • Add test for FFA_VERSION interface.

    • Add test for FFA_FEATURES interface.

    • Add console driver for the TI UART 16550.

    • Add tests for FF-A memory sharing interfaces between tftf and cactus secure partitions.

    • NVIDIA Tegra194:

      • Introduce platform port for Tegra194 to to initialize the tftf framework and execute tests on the CPUs.

      • Introduce power management support.

      • Introduce support for RTC as wake source.

      • Introduce system reset functionality test.

      • Introduce watchdog timer test.

      • Introduce support for NVIDIA Denver CPUs.

      • Introduce RAS uncorrectable error injection test.

      • Introduce tests to verify the Video Memory resize interface.

      • Introduce test to inject RAS corrected errors for all supported nodes from all CPUs.

      • Introduce a test to get return value from SMC SiP function TEGRA_SIP_GET_SMMU_PER.

    • NVIDIA Tegra196:

      • Introduce initial support for Tegra186 platforms.

    • NVIDIA Tegra210:

      • Introduce initial support for Tegra210 platforms.

Secure partition - Cactus

  • TFTF doesn’t need to boot Secondary Cactus as Hafnium now boots all partitions according to “boot-order” field value in the partition manifests.

  • Remove test files related to deprecated SPCI Alpha specification and SPRT interface.

  • Select different stdout device at runtime as primary VM can access to UART while secondary VM’s use hypervisor call to SPM for debug logging.

  • An SP maps its RX/TX buffers in its EL1&0 Stage-1 translation regime. The same RX/TX buffers are mapped by the SPMC in the SP’s EL1&0 Stage-2 translation regime during boot time.

  • Update memory/device region nodes in manifest. Memory region has 3 entries such as RX buffer, TX buffer and dummy. These memory region entries are mapped with attributes as “RX buffer: read-only”, “TX buffer: read-write” and “dummy: read-write-execute”. Device region mapped with read-write attribute.

  • Create tertiary partition without RX_TX region specified to test the RXTX_MAP API.

  • Add third partition to ffa_partition_info_get test to test that a partition can successfully get information about the third cactus partition.

  • Map RXTX region to third partition to point the mailbox to this RXTX region.

  • Adjust the number of EC context to max number of PEs as per the FF-A specification mandating that a SP must either “Implement as many ECs as the number of PEs (in case of a “multi-processor” SP with pinned contexts)” or “Implement a single EC (in case of a migratable “uni-processor” SP).

  • Updated cactus test payload and TFTF ids as it is decided to have secure partition FF-A ids in the range from 0x8001 to 0xfffe, 0x8000 and 0xffff FF-A ids are reserved for the SPMC and the SPMD respectively and in the non-secure worlds, FF-A id 0 is reserved for the hypervisor and 1 to 0x7fff FF-A ids are reserved for VMs.

  • Break the message loop on bad message request instead of replying with the FF-A error ABI to the SPMC.

  • Remove deprecated hypervisor calls spm_vm_get_count and spm_vcpu_get_count. Instead use FFA_PARTITION_INFO_GET discovery ABI.

  • Implement hvc call ‘SPM_INTERRUPT_GET’ to get interrupt id.

  • Re-structure platform dependent files by moving platform dependent files and macros to platform specific folder.

  • Adjust partition info get properties to support receipt of direct message request.

  • New tests:

    • Add FFA Version Test.

    • Add FFA_FEATURES test.

    • Add FFA_MEM_SHARE test

    • Add FFA_MEM_LEND test.

    • Add FFA_MEM_DONATE test.

    • Add FFA_PARTITION_INFO_GET test.

    • Add exception/interrupt framework.

    • Add cactus support for TC0 platform.

Issues resolved since last release

  • Update link to SMCCC specification.

  • Trim down the top-level readme file to give brief overview of the project and also fix/update a number of broken/out-dated links in it.

  • Bug fix in Multicore IRQ spurious test.

  • Fix memory regions mapping with no NS bit set.

  • Reenable PSCI NODE_HW_STATE test which was disabled earlier due to outdated SCP firmware.

  • Fix Aarch32 zeromem() function by avoiding infinite loop in ‘zeromem’ function and optimizing ‘memcpy4’ function.

  • Add missing help_tests info on help target in the top-level Makefile.

  • Trim down the readme file as it does not need to provide detailed information, instead it can simply be a landing page providing a brief overview of the project and redirecting the reader to RTD for further information.

  • Fix maximum number of CPUs in DSU cluster by setting maximum number of CPUs in DSU cluster to 8.

Version 2.3

New features

  • More tests are made available in this release to help validate the functionality of TF-A.

  • CI upgraded to use GCC 9.2-2019.12 toolchain for tf-a-tests.

  • Various improvements to test framework and test suite.

TFTF

  • Support for extended register usage as per SMCCC v1.2 specification.

  • Support for FVP platforms with SMT capabilities.

  • Improved support for documentation through addition of basic Sphinx configuration and Makefile similar to TF-A repository.

  • Enhancement to libc library synchronous to TF-A code base.

  • ARMv8.3-PAuth enabled for all FWU tests in TFTF.

  • TFTF made RFC 4122 compliant by converting UUIDs to network order format.

  • Build improvement by deprecating custom AARCH64/AARCH32 macros in favor of __arch64__ macro provided by compiler.

  • Support for HVC as a SMCCC conduit in TFTF.

  • New tests:

    • AArch32 tests for checking if PMU counters leak in secure world.

    • Add new debug filesystem (debugfs) test.

    • Add a SPCI direct messaging test targeting bare-metal cactus SP.

Secure partitions

Cactus

  • Several build improvements and symbol relocation fixup to make it position independent executable.

  • Update of sample manifest to SPCI Beta1 format.

  • Support for generating JSON file as required by TF-A.

Issues resolved since last release

  • Makefile bug fix for performing parallel builds.

  • Add missing D-cache invalidation of RW memory in tftf_entrypoint to safeguard against possible corruption.

  • Fixes in GIC drivers to support base addresses beyond 4G range.

  • Fix build with XML::LibXML 2.0202 Perl module

Known issues and limitations

The sections below list the known issues and limitations of each test image provided in this repository. Unless and otherwise stated, issues and limitations stated in previous release continue to exist in this release.

TFTF

  • NODE_HW_STATE test has been temporarily disabled for sgi575 platform due to a dependency on SCP binaries version 2.5

Version 2.2

New features

  • A wide range of tests are made available in this release to help validate the functionality of TF-A.

  • Various improvements to test framework and test suite.

TFTF

  • Enhancement to xlat table library synchronous to TF-A code base.

  • Enabled strict alignment checks (SCTLR.A & SCTLR.SA) in all images.

  • Support for a simple console driver. Currently it serves as a placeholder with empty functions.

  • A topology helper API is added in the framework to get parent node info.

  • Support for FVP with clusters having upto 8 CPUs.

  • Enhanced linker script to separate code and RO data sections.

  • Relax SMC calls tests. The SMCCC specification recommends Trusted OSes to mitigate the risk of leaking information by either preserving the register state over the call, or returning a constant value, such as zero, in each register. Tests only allowed the former behaviour and have been extended to allow the latter as well.

  • Pointer Authentication enabled on warm boot path with individual APIAKey generation for each CPU.

  • New tests:

    • Basic unit tests for xlat table library v2.

    • Tests for validating SVE support in TF-A.

    • Stress tests for dynamic xlat table library.

    • PSCI test to measure latencies when turning ON a cluster.

    • Series of AArch64 tests that stress the secure world to leak sensitive counter values.

    • Test to validate PSCI SYSTEM_RESET call.

    • Basic tests to validate Memory Tagging Extensions are being enabled and ensuring no undesired leak of sensitive data occurs.

  • Enhanced tests:

    • Improved tests for Pointer Authentication support. Checks are performed to see if pointer authentication keys are accessible as well as validate if secure keys are being leaked after a PSCI version call or TSP call.

    • Improved AMU test to remove unexecuted code iterating over Group1 counters and fix the conditional check of AMU Group0 counter value.

Secure partitions

A new Secure Partition Quark is introduced in this release.

Quark

The Quark test secure partition provided is a simple service which returns a magic number. Further, a simple test is added to test if Quark is functional.

Issues resolved since last release

  • Bug fix in libc memchr implementation.

  • Bug fix in calculation of number of CPUs.

  • Streamlined SMC WORKAROUND_2 test and fixed a false fail on Cortex-A76 CPU.

  • Pointer Authentication support is now available for secondary CPUs and the corresponding tests are stable in this release.

Known issues and limitations

The sections below list the known issues and limitations of each test image provided in this repository. Unless and otherwise stated, issues and limitations stated in previous release continue to exist in this release.

TFTF

  • Multicore spurious interrupt test is observed to have unstable behavior. As a temporary solution, this test is skipped for AArch64 Juno configurations.

  • Generating SVE instructions requires O3 compilation optimization. Since the current build structure does not allow compilation flag modification for specific files, the function which tests support for SVE has been pre-compiled and added as an assembly file.

Version 2.1

New features

  • Add initial support for testing Secure Partition Client Interface (SPCI) and Secure Partition Run-Time (SPRT) standards.

    Exercise the full communication flow throughout the software stack, involving:

    • A Secure-EL0 test partition as the Trusted World agent.

    • TFTF as the Normal World agent.

    • The Secure Partition Manager (SPM) in TF-A.

  • Various stability improvements, code refactoring and clean ups.

TFTF

  • Reorganize tests build infrastructure to allow the selection of a subset of tests.

  • Reorganize the platform layer for improved clarity and simplicity.

  • Sanitise inclusion of drivers header files.

  • Enhance the test report format for improved clarity and conciseness.

  • Dump CPU registers when hitting an unexpected exception. Previously, this would silently loop forever.

  • Import libc from TF-A to better align the two code bases.

  • New tests:

    • SPM tests for exercising communication through either the MM or SPCI/SPRT interfaces.

    • SMC calling convention tests.

    • Initial tests for Armv8.3 Pointer Authentication support (experimental).

  • New platform ports:

Secure partitions

We now have 3 Secure Partitions to test the SPM implementation in TF-A.

Cactus-MM

The Cactus test secure partition provided in version 2.0 has been renamed into “Cactus-MM”. It is still responsible for testing the SPM implementation based on the Arm Management Mode Interface.

Cactus

This is a new test secure partition (as the former “Cactus” has been renamed into “Cactus-MM”, see above).

Unlike Cactus-MM, this image tests the SPM implementation based on the SPCI and SPRT draft specifications.

It runs in Secure-EL0 and performs the following tasks:

  • Test that TF-A has correctly setup the secure partition environment (access to cache maintenance operations, to floating point registers, etc.)

  • Test that TF-A accepts to change data access permissions and instruction permissions on behalf of Cactus for memory regions the latter owns.

  • Test communication with SPM through SPCI/SPRT interfaces.

Ivy

This is also a new test secure partition. It is provided in order to test multiple partitions support in TF-A. It is derived from Cactus and essentially provides the same services but with different identifiers at the moment.

EL3 payload

Issues resolved since last release

  • The GICv2 spurious IRQ test is no longer Juno-specific. It is now only GICv2-specific.

  • The manual tests in AArch32 state now work properly. After investigation, we identified that this issue was not AArch32 specific but concerned any test relying on state information persisting across reboots. It was due to an incorrect build configuration.

  • Cactus-MM now successfully links with GNU toolchain 7.3.1.

Known issues and limitations

The sections below lists the known issues and limitations of each test image provided in this repository.

TFTF

The TFTF test image might be conceptually sub-divided further in 2 parts: the tests themselves, and the test framework they are based upon.

Test framework

  • Some stability issues.

  • No mechanism to abort tests when they time out (e.g. this could be implemented using a watchdog).

  • No convenient way to include or exclude tests on a per-platform basis.

  • Power domains and affinity levels are considered equivalent but they may not necessarily be.

  • Need to provide better support to alleviate duplication of test code. There are some recurrent test patterns for which helper functions should be provided. For example, bringing up all CPUs on the platform and executing the same function on all of them, or programming an interrupt and waiting for it to trigger.

  • Every CPU that participates in a test must return from the test function. If it does not - e.g. because it powered itself off for testing purposes - then the test framework will wait forever for this CPU. This limitation is too restrictive for some tests.

  • No protection against interrupted flash operations. If the target is reset while some data is written to flash, the test framework might behave incorrectly on reset.

  • When compiling the code, if the generation of the tests_list.c and/or tests_list.h files fails, the build process is not aborted immediately and will only fail later on.

  • The directory layout requires further improvements. Most of the test framework code has been moved under the tftf/ directory to better isolate it but this effort is not complete. As a result, there are still some TFTF files scattered around.

  • Pointer Authentication testing is experimental and incomplete at this stage. It is only enabled on the primary CPU on the cold boot.

Tests

  • Some tests are implemented for AArch64 only and are skipped on AArch32.

  • Some tests are not robust enough:

    • Some tests might hang in some circumstances. For example, they might wait forever for a condition to become true.

    • Some tests rely on arbitrary time delays instead of proper synchronization when executing order-sensitive steps.

    • Some tests have been implemented in a practical manner: they seem to work on actual hardware but they make assumptions that are not guaranteed by the Arm architecture. Therefore, they might fail on some other platforms.

  • PSCI stress tests are very unreliable and will often hang. The root cause is not known for sure but this might be due to bad synchronization between CPUs.

  • The GICv2 spurious IRQ test sometimes fails with the following error message:

    SMC @ lead CPU returned 0xFFFFFFFF 0x8 0xC

    The root cause is unknown.

  • The FWU tests take a long time to complete. This is because they wait for the watchdog to reset the system. On FVP, TF-A configures the watchdog period to about 4 min. This limit is excessive for an automated testing context and leaves the user without feedback and unable to determine if the tests are proceeding properly.

  • The test “Target timer to a power down cpu” sometimes fails with the following error message:

    Expected timer switch: 4 Actual: 3

    The root cause is unknown.

FWU images

  • The FWU tests do not work on the revC of the Base AEM FVP. They only work on the revB.

  • NS-BL1U and NS-BL2U images reuse TFTF-specific code for legacy reasons. This is not a clean design and may cause confusion.

Test secure partitions (Cactus, Cactus-MM, Ivy)

  • This is experimental code. It’s likely to change a lot as the secure partition software architecture evolves.

  • Supported on AArch64 FVP platform only.

All test images

  • TF-A Tests are derived from a fork of TF-A so:

    • they’ve got some code in common but lag behind on some features.

    • there might still be some irrelevant references to TF-A.

  • Some design issues. E.g. TF-A Tests inherited from the I/O layer of TF-A, which still needs a major rework.

  • Cannot build TF-A Tests with Clang. Only GCC is supported.

  • The build system does not cope well with parallel building. The user should not attempt to run multiple jobs in parallel with the -j option of GNU make.

  • The build system does not properly track build options. A clean build must be performed every time a build option changes.

  • UUIDs are not compliant to RFC 4122.

  • No floating point support. The code is compiled with GCC flag -mgeneral-regs-only, which prevents the compiler from generating code that accesses floating point registers. This might limit some test scenarios.

  • The documentation is too lightweight.

  • Missing instruction barriers in some places before reading the system counter value. As a result, the CPU could speculatively read it and any delay loop calculations might be off (because based on stale values). We need to examine all such direct reads of the CNTPCT_EL0 register and replace them with a call to syscounter_read() where appropriate.

Version 2.0

New features

This is the first public release of the Trusted Firmware-A Tests source code.

TFTF

  • Provides a baremetal test framework to exercise TF-A features through its SMC interface.

  • Integrates easily with TF-A: the TFTF binary is packaged in the FIP image as a BL33 component.

  • Standalone binary that runs on the target without human intervention (except for some specific tests that require a manual target reset).

  • Designed for multi-core testing. The various sub-frameworks allow maximum parallelism in order to stress the firmware.

  • Displays test results on the UART output. This may then be parsed by an external tool and integrated in a continuous integration system.

  • Supports running in AArch64 (NS-EL2 or NS-EL1) and AArch32 states.

  • Supports parsing a tests manifest (XML file) listing the tests to include in the binary.

  • Detects most platform features at run time (e.g. topology, GIC version, …).

  • Provides a topology enumeration framework. Allows tests to easily go through affinity levels and power domain nodes.

  • Provides an event framework to synchronize CPU operations in a multi-core context.

  • Provides a timer framework. Relies on a single global timer to generate interrupts for all CPUs in the system. This allows tests to easily program interrupts on demand to use as a wake-up event source to come out of CPU suspend state for example.

  • Provides a power-state enumeration framework. Abstracts the valid power states supported on the platform.

  • Provides helper functions for power management operations (CPU hotplug, CPU suspend, system suspend, …) with proper saving of the hardware state.

  • Supports rebooting the platform at the end of each test for greater independence between tests.

  • Supports interrupting and resuming a test session. This relies on storing test results in non-volatile memory (e.g. flash).

FWU images

  • Provides example code to exercise the Firmware Update feature of TF-A.

  • Tests the robustness of the FWU state machine implemented in the TF-A by sending valid and invalid authentication, copy and image execution requests to the TF-A BL1 image.

EL3 test payload

  • Tests the ability of TF-A to load an EL3 payload.

Cactus test secure partition

  • Tests that TF-A has correctly setup the secure partition environment: it should be allowed to perform cache maintenance operations, access floating point registers, etc.

  • Tests the ability of a secure partition to request changing data access permissions and instruction permissions of memory regions it owns.

  • Tests the ability of a secure partition to handle StandaloneMM requests.

Known issues and limitations

The sections below lists the known issues and limitations of each test image provided in this repository.

TFTF

The TFTF test image might be conceptually sub-divided further in 2 parts: the tests themselves, and the test framework they are based upon.

Test framework

  • Some stability issues.

  • No mechanism to abort tests when they time out (e.g. this could be implemented using a watchdog).

  • No convenient way to include or exclude tests on a per-platform basis.

  • Power domains and affinity levels are considered equivalent but they may not necessarily be.

  • Need to provide better support to alleviate duplication of test code. There are some recurrent test patterns for which helper functions should be provided. For example, bringing up all CPUs on the platform and executing the same function on all of them, or programming an interrupt and waiting for it to trigger.

  • Every CPU that participates in a test must return from the test function. If it does not - e.g. because it powered itself off for testing purposes - then the test framework will wait forever for this CPU. This limitation is too restrictive for some tests.

  • No protection against interrupted flash operations. If the target is reset while some data is written to flash, the test framework might behave incorrectly on reset.

  • When compiling the code, if the generation of the tests_list.c and/or tests_list.h files fails, the build process is not aborted immediately and will only fail later on.

  • The directory layout is confusing. Most of the test framework code has been moved under the tftf/ directory to better isolate it but this effort is not complete. As a result, there are still some TFTF files scattered around.

Tests

  • Some tests are implemented for AArch64 only and are skipped on AArch32.

  • Some tests are not robust enough:

    • Some tests might hang in some circumstances. For example, they might wait forever for a condition to become true.

    • Some tests rely on arbitrary time delays instead of proper synchronization when executing order-sensitive steps.

    • Some tests have been implemented in a practical manner: they seem to work on actual hardware but they make assumptions that are not guaranteed by the Arm architecture. Therefore, they might fail on some other platforms.

  • PSCI stress tests are very unreliable and will often hang. The root cause is not known for sure but this might be due to bad synchronization between CPUs.

  • The GICv2 spurious IRQ test is Juno-specific. In reality, it should only be GICv2-specific. It should be reworked to remove any platform-specific assumption.

  • The GICv2 spurious IRQ test sometimes fails with the following error message:

    SMC @ lead CPU returned 0xFFFFFFFF 0x8 0xC

    The root cause is unknown.

  • The manual tests in AArch32 mode do not work properly. They save some state information into non-volatile memory in order to detect the reset reason but this state does not appear to be retained. As a result, these tests keep resetting infinitely.

  • The FWU tests take a long time to complete. This is because they wait for the watchdog to reset the system. On FVP, TF-A configures the watchdog period to about 4 min. This is way too long in an automated testing context. Besides, the user gets not feedback, which may let them think that the tests are not working properly.

  • The test “Target timer to a power down cpu” sometimes fails with the following error message:

    Expected timer switch: 4 Actual: 3

    The root cause is unknown.

FWU images

  • The FWU tests do not work on the revC of the Base AEM FVP. They only work on the revB.

  • NS-BL1U and NS-BL2U images reuse TFTF-specific code for legacy reasons. This is not a clean design and may cause confusion.

Cactus test secure partition

  • Cactus is experimental code. It’s likely to change a lot as the secure partition software architecture evolves.

  • Fails to link with GNU toolchain 7.3.1.

  • Cactus is supported on AArch64 FVP platform only.

All test images

  • TF-A Tests are derived from a fork of TF-A so:

    • they’ve got some code in common but lag behind on some features.

    • there might still be some irrelevant references to TF-A.

  • Some design issues. E.g. TF-A Tests inherited from the I/O layer of TF-A, which still needs a major rework.

  • Cannot build TF-A Tests with Clang. Only GCC is supported.

  • The build system does not cope well with parallel building. The user should not attempt to run multiple jobs in parallel with the -j option of GNU make.

  • The build system does not properly track build options. A clean build must be performed every time a build option changes.

  • SMCCC v2 is not properly supported.

  • UUIDs are not compliant to RFC 4122.

  • No floating point support. The code is compiled with GCC flag -mgeneral-regs-only, which prevents the compiler from generating code that accesses floating point registers. This might limit some test scenarios.

  • The documentation is too lightweight.

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