Platform deprecation and removal

Process for Platform deprecation and removal

A platform may need to be removed from upstream code due to lack of community interest or it may have reached end of life. The below section calls out the process for removing platform support from TF-M.

An email to the TF-M mailing list proposing the removal of the platform.

The merit of the proposal will be considered by the maintainers for a period of 4 weeks and community can express their opinion on the same during this time window. The platform owner can veto the proposal and incase of multiple platform owners with differing opinion or community having interest in the platform, then the project maintainer can work with the platform owner and use their discretion to decide on the proposal.

Once a decision is made to remove the platform, the platform is considered to be in deprecated state as per platform support lifecyle defined here: “https://developer.trustedfirmware.org/w/collaboration/project-maintenance-process/”. The platform will be marked as deprecated and the TF-M version after which it will be removed will also be mentioned. Suitable build time or runtime messages needs to be incorporated to the platform to warn about the deprecation.

The project should strive to keep the deprecated platforms building/running till the removal. This relies on platform owners being still actively involved with the project and maintaining the platform.

Although this will be the usual process for platform deprecation and eventual removal, the process still leaves room for the platform deprecation to be cancelled after it has been marked as deprecated due to evolving project and market requirements. This is left to consensus between project maintainers and platform owner/s.

Once a platform has been removed, it can be added back in future and this would follow the same guidelines as for a new platform contribution.

List of Deprecated Platforms

The below list calls out platforms marked for deprecation according to the above process and the platform will be removed soon after the mentioned release.

Deprecated Platform	Removed after release	Comments
mps2/an539	v1.2.0	N.A
mps2/sse-200_aws	v1.3.0	N.A
musca_a	v1.3.0	N.A
arm/mps2/fvp_sse300	v1.4.0	N.A