Introduction

Trusted Firmware OP TEE v3.16.0 was released on the 28th of January, 2022. The release includes support for asynchronous notifications, FF-A updates, BTI (Branch Target Identification), generic driver probing sequence and many more.

Highlights

Here are some of the main additions in OP TEE 3.16.0:

• Patches to support asynchronous notification to the non-secure world have been merged in optee-os and arm-soc tree for linux kernel v5.17.
• Generic clock framework support.
• Generic driver probing sequence. With this a driver has been added to parse secure device tree and call driver probe functions for nodes with matching compatible drivers.
• Armv8 Security Extension Support
  • FEAT_BTI (Branch Target Identification) support - Armv8.5-A introduces support of BTI’s to protect against JOP (Jump oriented programming) attacks. This can now be enabled for OP-TEE core and TA’s.
• FF-A Support
  • OP-TEE FF-A kernel driver has been merged in kernel v5.16.0. With this FF-A ABI support in OP-TEE is a stable ABI that needs to be backward compatible.
  • Support for FFA ABI’s for memory sharing between SP’s and to return partition information.
• The option is now available for signing TA’s with AWS KMS. A new option added for verifying the signed TA’s.
• Build environments
  • Support for testing Trusted Keys framework with OP-TEE on QEMU v8.
  • Support for FF-A on QEMU v8 using the new SPMC_AT_EL flag.
• New Platform Support
  • i.MX8ULP
  • i.MX8DXL
  • Aspeed AST2600
  • Advantech RSB-3720 board

More details regarding the updates in this release can be found here.

Additional information

The release included updates to the following repos:

• optee_os - 327 commits and 132 PR’s
• optee_client - 11 commits and 8 PR’s
• optee_test - 13 commits and 13 PR’s
• build - 19 commits and 15 PR’s

Testing of the release has been performed by the committers and can be found here Thirty eight devices were tested for this release using the OP-TEE xtest test suite. Testing results can be found in the pull request itself

The release has been tagged at 3.16.0 using the OP TEE release procedure.

The OP TEE release roadmap can be found here.

Any security fixes prior to the next release will be made available on the Security Advisories page.