On Wednesday, January 14, 2026 4:26:36 AM CST Konrad Dybcio wrote:

On 1/14/26 4:54 AM, Alex G. wrote:

quoted

On Tuesday, January 13, 2026 8:28:11 AM CST Konrad Dybcio wrote:

quoted

On 1/9/26 5:33 AM, Alexandru Gagniuc wrote:

quoted

Support loading remoteproc firmware on IPQ9574 with the qcom_q6v5_wcss
driver. This firmware is usually used to run ath11k firmware and enable
wifi with chips such as QCN5024.

When submitting v1, I learned that the firmware can also be loaded by
the trustzone firmware. Since TZ is not shipped with the kernel, it
makes sense to have the option of a native init sequence, as not all
devices come with the latest TZ firmware.

Qualcomm tries to assure us that the TZ firmware will always do the
right thing (TM), but I am not fully convinced

Why else do you think it's there in the firmware? :(

A more relevant question is, why do some contributors sincerely believe
that the TZ initialization of Q6 firmware is not a good idea for their
use case?

To answer your question, I think the TZ initialization is an afterthought
of the SoC design. I think it was only after ther the design stage that
it was brought up that a remoteproc on AHB has out-of-band access to
system memory, which poses security concerns to some customers. I think
authentication was implemented in TZ to address that. I also think that
in order to prevent clock glitching from bypassing such verification,
they had to move the initialization sequence in TZ as well.

I wouldn't exactly call it an afterthought.. Image authentication (as in,
verifying the signature of the ELF) has always been part of TZ, because
doing so in a user-modifiable context would be absolutely nonsensical

qcom_scm_pas_auth_and_reset() which configures and powers up the rproc
has been there for a really long time too (at least since the 2012 SoCs
like MSM8974) and I would guesstimate it's been there for a reason - not
all clocks can or should be accessible from the OS (from a SW standpoint
it would be convenient to have a separate SECURE_CC block where all the
clocks we shouldn't care about are moved, but the HW design makes more
sense as-is, for the most part), plus there is additional access control
hardware on the platform that must be configured from a secure context
(by design) which I assume could be part of this sequence, based on
the specifics of a given SoC

What was the original use case for the Q6 remoteproc? I see today's use case 
is as a conduit for ath11k firmware to control PCIe devices. Was that always 
the case? I imagine a more modern design would treat the remoteproc as 
untrusted by putting it under a bridge or IOMMU with more strict memory access 
control, so that firmware couldn't access OS memory.

Konrad