Re: [PATCH v1 0/6] PolarFire SoC Auto Update Support

Russ Weight
2023-03-30T00:12:14Z

Hi Conor,

Sorry for the slow reply - I was out of the office for a week...

On 3/22/23 11:51, Conor Dooley wrote:
> Hey Russ,
>
> On Mon, Feb 27, 2023 at 10:56:07PM +0000, Conor Dooley wrote:
>> On Mon, Feb 27, 2023 at 02:42:30PM -0800, Russ Weight wrote:
>>> On 2/27/23 14:16, Conor Dooley wrote:
>>>> On Mon, Feb 27, 2023 at 02:04:36PM -0800, Russ Weight wrote:
>>>>> On 2/24/23 00:28, Conor Dooley wrote:
>>>>>> On Fri, Feb 24, 2023 at 03:57:09PM +0800, Xu Yilun wrote:
>>>>>>> On 2023-02-17 at 16:40:17 +0000, Conor Dooley wrote:
>>>>>>>> This patchset adds support for the "Auto Update" feature on PolarFire
>>>>>>>> SoC that allows for writing an FPGA bistream to the SPI flash connected
>>>>>>>> to the system controller.
>>>>>>> I haven't fully checked the patches yet, just some quick comments:
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Since this feature is just to R/W the flash, and would not affect the
>>>>>>> runtime FPGA region, I don't think an FPGA manager is actually needed.
>>>>>>> Why not just use the MTD uAPI? There is a set of exsiting MTD uAPI &
>>>>>>> MTD tool if I remember correctly.
>>>>>> A lack of interest in opening up the system controller to userspace!
>>>>>> You're right in that the writing of the image can be done that way, and
>>>>>> while I was testing I used the userspace bits of mtd along the way - but
>>>>>> for validating that the image we are writing we rely on the system
>>>>>> controller.
>>>>>> I'm really not interested in exposing the system controller's
>>>>>> functionality, especially the bitstream manipulation parts, to userspace
>>>>>> due to the risk of input validation bugs, so at least that side of
>>>>>> things should remain in the kernel.
>>>>>> I suppose I could implement something custom in drivers/soc that does
>>>>>> the validation only, and push the rest out to userspace. Just seemed
>>>>>> fitting to do the whole lot in drivers/fpga.
>>>>> In case you haven't already looked at the new firmware-upload
>>>>> support in the firmware-loader, I'll give you some references
>>>>> here to see if it fit you needs. This would only support the
>>>>> write (not the read) but it would allow the controller to do
>>>>> validation on the write.
>>>>>
>>>>> The is the cover letter which shows a usage example:
>>>>> https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20220421212204.36052-1-russell.h.weight@intel.com/
>>>>>
>>>>> And this is a pointer to the latest documentation for it:
>>>>> https://docs.kernel.org/driver-api/firmware/fw_upload.html
>>>>>
>>>>> The only current user is: drivers/fpga/intel-m10-bmc-sec-update.c
>>>> Sounds interesting, I shall go and take a look. Just quickly, when you
>>>> say it wouldn't support the read, what exactly do you mean?
>>>> The only read that I am really interested in doing is reading the first
>>>> 1K of flash as I need to RMW it, but I don't think that that's what you
>>>> mean.
>>>> Do you mean that I would not be able to dump the firmware using your
>>>> fw_upload interface? If so, that's an acceptable constraint IMO.
>>> Yes - I mean that you couldn't dump the firmware image from userspace
>>> using the fw_upload interface. The sysfs interface allows you to read
>>> and write a temporary buffer, but once you "echo 0 > loading", there
>>> is no sysfs interface associated with the firmware-loader that would
>>> allow you to read the image from flash. Your controller actually does
>>> the writes, so RMW in that context is fine.
>> Ahh cool. I don't really care about dumping the firmware via such a
>> mechanism, so that sounds good to me.
>> I'll check out your approach, the immediate thought is that it sounds
>> suitable to my use case, so thanks!
> Taken me a while to get around to it, but thanks for your suggestion.
> Looks like it is suitable for what I am trying to do, so in the middle
> of working on another version of this using fw_upload.
> The enum return codes from write are a little clumsy, but oh well, could
> be worse I suppose.
>
> Just one thing I noted (although I rarely pay much attention to/rely on
> the driver-api docs when recent drivers exist as usable examples) is
> that the docs for this stuff is a wee bit out of date due to some API
> changes.
> In the code example in this document:
> https://docs.kernel.org/driver-api/firmware/fw_upload.html
> firmware_upload_register() has fewer arguments than it does when you
> look at the signature of the function in the documentation right below
> it.

I saw your patch to fix this. Thanks!

- Russ
>
> Cheers,
> Conor.