Re: [PATCH RESEND V2 4/6] platform/x86: Add Intel Software Defined Silicon driver

[David E. Box]

On Wed, 2021-12-08 at 17:29 +0100, Greg KH wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 07, 2021 at 05:50:13PM -0800, David E. Box wrote:
> > Intel Software Defined Silicon (SDSi) is a post manufacturing mechanism for
> > activating additional silicon features. Features are enabled through a
> > license activation process.  The SDSi driver provides a per socket, sysfs
> > attribute interface for applications to perform 3 main provisioning
> > functions:
> > 
> > 1. Provision an Authentication Key Certificate (AKC), a key written to
> >    internal NVRAM that is used to authenticate a capability specific
> >    activation payload.
> > 
> > 2. Provision a Capability Activation Payload (CAP), a token authenticated
> >    using the AKC and applied to the CPU configuration to activate a new
> >    feature.
> > 
> > 3. Read the SDSi State Certificate, containing the CPU configuration
> >    state.
> > 
> > The operations perform function specific mailbox commands that forward the
> > requests to SDSi hardware to perform authentication of the payloads and
> > enable the silicon configuration (to be made available after power
> > cycling).
> > 
> > The SDSi device itself is enumerated as an auxiliary device from the
> > intel_vsec driver and as such has a build dependency on CONFIG_INTEL_VSEC.
> > 
> > Link: https://github.com/intel/intel-sdsi
> 
> Also, why not put the documentation that you have currently at that link
> in this commit in the driver itself?  That would make it much more
> self-contained and live longer than some random external web link that
> could go away at any moment.

The documentation describes the hardware interface only. It's not OS specific so it was easier to
add a link. But there's no problem adding a copy to Documentaion in the kernel.

David
> 
> thanks,
> 
> greg k-h