3.6. Contributor’s Guide

3.6.1. Getting Started

  • Make sure you have a Github account and you are logged on both developer.trustedfirmware.org and review.trustedfirmware.org.

    Also make sure that you have registered your full name and email address in your review.trustedfirmware.org profile. Otherwise, the Gerrit server might reject patches you attempt to post for review.

  • If you plan to contribute a major piece of work, it is usually a good idea to start a discussion around it on the TF-A mailing list. This gives everyone visibility of what is coming up, you might learn that somebody else is already working on something similar or the community might be able to provide some early input to help shaping the design of the feature.

    If you intend to include Third Party IP in your contribution, please mention it explicitly in the email thread and ensure that the changes that include Third Party IP are made in a separate patch (or patch series).

  • Clone the Trusted Firmware-A source code on your own machine as described in Getting the TF-A Source.

  • Create a local topic branch based on the Trusted Firmware-A master branch.

3.6.2. Making Changes

  • Ensure commits adhere to the project’s Commit Style.

  • Make commits of logical units. See these general Git guidelines for contributing to a project.

  • Keep the commits on topic. If you need to fix another bug or make another enhancement, please address it on a separate topic branch.

  • Split the patch in manageable units. Small patches are usually easier to review so this will speed up the review process.

  • Avoid long commit series. If you do have a long series, consider whether some commits should be squashed together or addressed in a separate topic.

  • Follow the Coding Style and Coding Guidelines.

    • Use the checkpatch.pl script provided with the Linux source tree. A Makefile target is provided for convenience, see this section for more details.

  • Where appropriate, please update the documentation.

    • Consider whether the Porting Guide, Firmware Design document or other in-source documentation needs updating.

    • If you are submitting new files that you intend to be the code owner for (for example, a new platform port), then also update the Code owners file.

    • For topics with multiple commits, you should make all documentation changes (and nothing else) in the last commit of the series. Otherwise, include the documentation changes within the single commit.

3.6.3. Submitting Changes

Note

Please follow the How to Contribute Code section of the OpenCI documentation for general instructions on setting up Gerrit and posting patches there. The rest of this section provides details about patch submission rules specifically for the TF-A project.

  • Submit your changes for review using the git review command.

    This will automatically rebase them onto the upstream integration branch, as required by TF-A’s patch submission process.

  • From the Gerrit web UI, add reviewers for your patch:

    • At least one code owner for each module modified by the patch. See the list of modules and their Code owners.

    • At least one maintainer. See the list of Maintainers.

    • If some module has no code owner, try to identify a suitable (non-code owner) reviewer. Running git blame on the module’s source code can help, as it shows who has been working the most recently on this area of the code.

      Alternatively, if it is impractical to identify such a reviewer, you might send an email to the TF-A mailing list to broadcast your review request to the community.

    Note that self-reviewing a patch is prohibited, even if the patch author is the only code owner of a module modified by the patch. Getting a second pair of eyes on the code is essential to keep up with the quality standards the project aspires to.

  • The changes will then undergo further review by the designated people. Any review comments will be made directly on your patch. This may require you to do some rework. For controversial changes, the discussion might be moved to the TF-A mailing list to involve more of the community.

    Refer to the Gerrit Uploading Changes documentation for more details.

  • The patch submission rules are the following. For a patch to be approved and merged in the tree, it must get:

    • One Code-Owner-Review+1 for each of the modules modified by the patch.

    • A Maintainer-Review+1.

    In the case where a code owner could not be found for a given module, Code-Owner-Review+1 is substituted by Code-Review+1.

    In addition to these various code review labels, the patch must also get a Verified+1. This is usually set by the Continuous Integration (CI) bot when all automated tests passed on the patch. Sometimes, some of these automated tests may fail for reasons unrelated to the patch. In this case, the maintainers might (after analysis of the failures) override the CI bot score to certify that the patch has been correctly tested.

    In the event where the CI system lacks proper tests for a patch, the patch author or a reviewer might agree to perform additional manual tests in their review and the reviewer incorporates the review of the additional testing in the Code-Review+1 or Code-Owner-Review+1 as applicable to attest that the patch works as expected. Where possible additional tests should be added to the CI system as a follow up task. For example, for a platform-dependent patch where the said platform is not available in the CI system’s board farm.

  • When the changes are accepted, the Maintainers will integrate them.

    • Typically, the Maintainers will merge the changes into the integration branch.

    • If the changes are not based on a sufficiently-recent commit, or if they cannot be automatically rebased, then the Maintainers may rebase it on the integration branch or ask you to do so.

    • After final integration testing, the changes will make their way into the master branch. If a problem is found during integration, the Maintainers will request your help to solve the issue. They may revert your patches and ask you to resubmit a reworked version of them or they may ask you to provide a fix-up patch.

3.6.4. Add CI Configurations

TF-A uses Jenkins for Continuous Integration and testing activities. Various CI jobs are deployed to run tests on every patch before being merged. Each of your patches go through a series of checks before they get merged on to the master branch. Kindly ensure that every time you add new files under your platform, they are covered by the following two sections.

3.6.4.1. Coverity Scan

The TF-A project makes use of Coverity Scan for static analysis, a service offered by Synopsys for open-source projects. This tool is able to find defects and vulnerabilities in a code base, such as dereferences of NULL pointers, use of uninitialized data, control flow issues and many other things.

The TF-A source code is submitted daily to this service for analysis. Results of the latest and previous scans, as well as the complete list of defects it detected, are accessible online from https://scan.coverity.com/projects/arm-software-arm-trusted-firmware.

The tf-a-ci-scripts repository contains scripts to run the Coverity Scan tools on the integration branch of the TF-A code base and make them available on https://scan.coverity.com. These scripts get executed daily by the tf-a-coverity Jenkins job.

In order to maintain a high level of coverage, including on newly introduced code, it is important to maintain the appropriate TF-A CI scripts. Details of when to update these scripts and how to do so follow.

We maintain a build script - tf-cov-make - which contains the build configurations of various platforms in order to cover the entire source code being analysed by Coverity.

When you submit your patches for review, and if they contain new source files, TF-A CI static checks job might report that these files are not covered. In this case, the job’s console output will show the following error message:

****** Newly added files detection check for Coverity Scan analysis on patch(es) ******

Result : FAILURE

New source files have been identified in your patch..
some/dir/file.c

please ensure to include them for the ``Coverity Scan analysis`` by adding
the respective build configurations in the ``tf-cov-make`` build script.

In this section you find the details on how to append your new build configurations for Coverity scan analysis illustrated with examples:

  1. We maintain a separate repository named tf-a-ci-scripts repository for placing all the test scripts which will be executed by the CI Jobs.

  2. In this repository, tf-cov-make script is located at tf-a-ci-scripts/script/tf-coverity/tf-cov-make

  3. Edit the tf-cov-make script by appending all the possible build configurations with the specific build flags relevant to your platform, so that newly added source files get built and analysed by Coverity.

  4. For better understanding follow the below specified examples listed in the tf-cov-make script.

Example 1:
#Intel
make PLAT=stratix10 $(common_flags) all
make PLAT=agilex $(common_flags) all
  • In the above example there are two different SoCs stratix and agilex under the Intel platform and the build configurations has been added suitably to include most of their source files.

Example 2:
#Hikey
make PLAT=hikey $(common_flags) ${TBB_OPTIONS} ENABLE_PMF=1 all
make PLAT=hikey960 $(common_flags) ${TBB_OPTIONS} all
make PLAT=poplar $(common_flags) all
  • In this case for Hikey boards additional build flags have been included along with the common_flags to cover most of the files relevant to it.

  • Similar to this you can still find many other different build configurations of various other platforms listed in the tf-cov-make script. Kindly refer them and append your build configurations respectively.

3.6.4.2. Test Build Configurations

We have CI jobs which run a set of test configurations on every TF-A patch before they get merged upstream.

At the bare minimum, TF-A code should build without any errors for every supported platform - and every feature of this platform. To make sure this is the case, we maintain a set of build tests. tf-l1-build-plat is the test group which holds all build tests for all platforms. So be kind enough to verify that your newly added files are covered by such a build test.

If this is not the case, please follow the instructions below to add the appropriate files. We will illustrate this with an example for the Hikey platform.

  • In the tf-a-ci-scripts repository we need to add a build configuration file hikey-default under tf_config/ folder. tf_config/hikey-default must list all the build parameters relevant to it.

# Hikey Build Parameters
CROSS_COMPILE=aarch64-none-elf-
PLAT=hikey
  • Further another file, hikey-default:nil, needs to be added under group/tf-l1-build-plat/ folder to allow the platform to be built as part of this test group. group/tf-l1-build-plat/hikey-default:nil file just needs to exist but does not contain anything meaningful, apart from a mandatory copyright notice:

#
# Copyright (c) 2019-2022 Arm Limited. All rights reserved.
#
# SPDX-License-Identifier: BSD-3-Clause
#
  • As illustrated above, you need to add similar files supporting your platform.

For a more elaborate explanation of the TF-A CI scripts internals, including how to add more complex tests beyond a simple build test, please refer to the TF-A CI scripts overview section of the OpenCI documentation.

3.6.5. Binary Components

  • Platforms may depend on binary components submitted to the Trusted Firmware binary repository if they require code that the contributor is unable or unwilling to open-source. This should be used as a rare exception.

  • All binary components must follow the contribution guidelines (in particular licensing rules) outlined in the readme.rst file of the binary repository.

  • Binary components must be restricted to only the specific functionality that cannot be open-sourced and must be linked into a larger open-source platform port. The majority of the platform port must still be implemented in open source. Platform ports that are merely a thin wrapper around a binary component that contains all the actual code will not be accepted.

  • Only platform port code (i.e. in the plat/<vendor> directory) may rely on binary components. Generic code must always be fully open-source.


Copyright (c) 2013-2024, Arm Limited and Contributors. All rights reserved.