linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH] firmware: bluefield: add boot control driver

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Date:   Tue, 10 Oct 2017 13:23:03 +0100
From:   Grant Likely <grant.likely@...retlab.ca>
To:     Leif Lindholm <leif.lindholm@...aro.org>
Cc:     Mark Rutland <mark.rutland@....com>,
        Sudeep Holla <sudeep.holla@....com>,
        Chris Metcalf <cmetcalf@...lanox.com>,
        Grant Likely <Grant.Likely@....com>,
        Ingo Molnar <mingo@...nel.org>,
        Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
        "Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@...ux.vnet.ibm.com>,
        Kevin Brodsky <kevin.brodsky@....com>,
        Thierry Reding <treding@...dia.com>,
        Nishanth Menon <nm@...com>, Jean Delvare <jdelvare@...e.de>,
        Lorenzo Pieralisi <lorenzo.pieralisi@....com>,
        Ard Biesheuvel <ard.biesheuvel@...aro.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] firmware: bluefield: add boot control driver

On Tue, Oct 10, 2017 at 12:58 PM, Leif Lindholm
<leif.lindholm@...aro.org> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Oct 10, 2017 at 11:23:32AM +0100, Mark Rutland wrote:
>> On Tue, Oct 10, 2017 at 11:15:39AM +0100, Sudeep Holla wrote:
>> > (+Mark, Grant)
>> >
>> > On 09/10/17 18:16, Chris Metcalf wrote:
>> > > The Mellanox BlueField SoC firmware supports a safe upgrade mode as
>> > > part of the flow where users put new firmware on the secondary eMMC
>> > > boot partition (the one not currently in use), tell the eMMC to make
>> > > the secondary boot partition primary, and reset.
>>
>> When you say "firmware", are you referreind to actual firmware, or a
>> platform-specific OS image?
>>
>> For the former, the preferred update mechanism would be UpdateCapsule().
>>
>> For the latter, I'm not sure what the usual mechanism for doing this
>> with EFI would be.
>>
>> Ard, Leif?
>
> This sounds to me very much like something we'd want to keep out of
> the kernel. Assuming ACPI means UEFI, there should be less invasive
> solutions to this problem.

Agreed. This looks like a very specific solution to a generic problem.

g.