On 26.04.19 12:21, Grant Likely wrote:
On 26/04/2019 10:49, Jan Kiszka wrote:
On 26.04.19 11:07, Francois Ozog wrote:
[...]
Here are the guiding principles of our efforts :
0) we want a cross architecture (x86/Arm/...), cross vendor and cross
processor model update solution
1) untrusted world cannot update trusted world
Conceptually, it can. It's a matter of validating the update by the
trusted world before using it. A trusted instance can allow an untrusted
one to write version 2, validate that before switching to it, and stick
with version 1 if that fails.
2) what the UEFI implementation does with the capsule is platform
specific
3) the update capsule payload is opaque
1) is a "philosophy" decision. When you have a root of trust down to
the operating system. So in theory everything should be fine. But the
attack surface is such that we can't rule out hacking (and history
prove this is unfortunately a safe assumption). In addition, there may
be liability aspects related to the who does the update: the hardware
platform administrator may not be the legal entity than the operating
system administrator. For instance:
- on Packet.net could, a customer can flash up to the BL33 untrusted
firmware but that is all.
- A surveillance camera can be operated by city personnel but only law
enforcement agency can see raw video (un-blurred faces and licence
plates). This can be implemented by a derivative of OPTEE SecureMedia
Path but if you allow untrusted world to update the trusted one, city
personnel can overcome the legal restriction.
With 1) this means that even U-Boot code shall not be able/allowed to
update S-EL3 firmware (be it Trusted Firmware A or something else),
Secure EL1/0 software (OPTEE and its applications or something else).
If possible, allowing the operating system administrator to
selectively (BL33 is OK but not S-EL3) update firmware is at least
platform dependent. Hence defeats 0)
With 2) we do not impose reboot to update. Some platform may impose
reboot or some designers will prefer reboot. We say that there is a
chain of responsibility for updates.
So it is perfectly OK to have a Linux software agent receive an update
by any mean (network, USB, serial...). The agent will pack this (or
those) into a capsule and push it to UEFI implementation.
The UEFI implementation (U-Boot or Tianocore) will then do whatever it
pleases for the update providing it complies with 1) So the UEFI
implementation can live update up to BL33 firmware.
Should the update be targeted to secure world, then the UEFI
implementation can pass it to S-EL3 for update (platform specific)
which means the update can also be live. It is a designer decision.
With 3) we have flexibility but sometimes too much flexibility is a
problem. Alexander Graf suggested we can use a FIT object to pass
diverse objects. It is "half" opaque but I really like the idea.
The contents of individual FIT components can be blocks to be placed
at a fix location in a NOR flash or a file, no importance.
What do everyone think about those design principles ?
UEFI and capsules can be fine for those platform that support it (and
it's still a rare feature) and for stuff like boot and peripheral
firmware. I don't think it's a wise, future-proof idea to use it for more.
UEFI is not a very healthy ecosystem yet, and I'm personally skeptical
it will evolve towards that (looking at that as both a user as well as
an OEM). It's not even present in quite a few of our use cases. In some
it will never be - think of safety-critical system: not affordable with
such a complex approach like UEFI.
Can I challenge that view a bit? On the Tianocore side I agree that the
ecosystem isn't very healthy. That project in particular struggles with
what to do with board support, having decided early on that board
support generally doesn't need to be in the main repository.
However, U-Boot support for the UEFI ABI is improving in leaps and
bounds. SUSE and Fedora both depend on U-Boot UEFI for booting on all
the Arm SBCs that they support, and enabling UEFI in U-Boot is just a
config option or two. There is a fair bit of encouragement from within
the project to enable UEFI by default.
I don't disagree that this aspect is a step forward (though pulling in things
redundant code via grub & Co is not really progress). But a Unix community would
have probably designed a technically more elegant solution on a green field than
the clumsy, legacy-based UEFI interfaces.
UEFI gets a bad rap at being complicated, but I think the U-Boot work
has shown that implementing the core UEFI ABI doesn't require much code
and isn't the complicated mess they everyone fears it to be.
Depends on how much you start to rely on UEFI features.
I don't see the conflict with safety critical for boot services. I can
Everything is certifiable - with infinite time and money. So you will likely
reduce the boot process to the very essential of your concrete system, removing
then unneeded abstractions and stages. Or you will find ways to eliminate that
from your argumentation, which would definitely include removing runtime services.
however see the arguement against UEFI runtime services as a poor
implementation could result in unbounded execution times. There's been
recent movement on the UEFI spec to make runtime services optional, and
in U-Boot they are mostly empty stubs.
Of course, it also depends on how much you need from UEFI to boot or to use
certain services like capsule updates (and which would be gone when you remove
runtime services).
It should not expand further into OS
domains. Updating complete filesystems and their content is beyond its
duties. We have all the required, tested, matured means for the OS in
the OS. For firmware, it can be an option - if that firmware is UEFI
compliant, with all needed options.
Here I agree 100%. Capsule update is a useful ABI for the OS to pass
firmware update blobs without needing to know specifics about the
platform, but everything from the kernel on up is out of scope.
OK, that's good.
So let's use UEFI and capsules as a one possible building block in the
design, but not as the cornerstone. Just like we do mandate that all
updates must be served and managed by our IoT cloud ;).
What do the firmware stacks in your projects look like? What percentage
are based on U-Boot? Littlekernel? Others?
I don't have absolute numbers. We have a lot of "standard" x86 UEFI systems,
many U-boot devices (of which, to my knowledge, none is on UEFI yet - no
surprise, that feature is still too "new"), and quite a few Coreboot designs (so
far only x86) that just need to load Linux and bypass a lot therefore. There
will likely be more exotic things but they will likely also do not deserve
attention.
UEFI has the advantage that it has a defined ABI, and only a small
amount of it needs to be implemented to execute UEFI OS loaders (ie. the
Linux UEFI stub). For the reference platform, I think it makes sense to
make the design decision that firmware provides UEFI, and the update
infrastructure is based on that. However, if UEFI doesn't work for a
particular stack/project then it can be swapped out. There will need to
be work done on the boot sequence, but all the rest of the OS stack is
still relevant.
Yes, I would design it in a way that a perfect UEFI implementation can take a
lot of boot-related tasks like safe boot configuration switching, watchdog
management, firmware and peripheral updating (possibly in lock-step with the OS)
etc. But I would always ensure that incomplete or immature UEFI implementations
will not complicate partial or complete replacements. Because the latter will
remain the default for quite a while, if not longer, I'm sure. UEFI should not
become the systemd of unattended device updates (or worse, due to closed
implementations).
Jan
--
Siemens AG, Corporate Technology, CT RDA IOT SES-DE
Corporate Competence Center Embedded Linux
_______________________________________________
U-Boot mailing list
U-Boot@lists.denx.de
https://lists.denx.de/listinfo/u-boot
