Intel Common Code Block Publishing EFI_MP_SERVICES_PPI

Introduction

This documentation is intended to document the purpose for creating EFI service Interface inside coreboot space to perform CPU feature programming on Application Processors for Intel 9th Gen (Cannon Lake) and beyond CPUs.

Today coreboot is capable enough to handle multi-processor initialization on IA platforms.

The multi-processor initialization code has to take care of lots of duties:

1. Bringing all cores out of reset
2. Load latest microcode on all cores
3. Sync latest MTRR snapshot between BSP and APs
4. Perform sets of CPU feature programming
   • CPU Power & Thermal Management
   • Overclocking
   • Intel Trusted Execution Technology
   • Intel Software Guard Extensions
   • Intel Processor Trace etc.

This above CPU feature programming lists are expected to grow with current and future CPU complexity and there might be some cases where certain feature programming mightbe closed source in nature.

Platform code might need to compromise on those closed source nature of CPU programming if we don’t plan to provide an alternate interface which can be used by coreboot to get-rid of such close source CPU programming.

Proposal

As coreboot is doing CPU multi-processor initialization for IA platform before FSP-S initialization and having all possible information about cores in terms of maximum number of cores, APIC ids, stack size etc. It’s also possible for coreboot to extend its own support model and create a sets of APIs which later can be used by FSP to run CPU feature programming using coreboot published APIs.

Due to the fact that FSP is using EFI infrastructure and need to relying on install/locate PPI to perform certain API call, hence coreboot has to created MP services APIs known as EFI_MP_SERVICES_PPI as per PI specification volume 1, section 8.3.9. More details here: PI_Spec_1_6

coreboot to publish EFI_MP_SERVICES_PPI APIs

API	Description
PeiGetNumberOfProcessors	Get the number of CPU’s.
PeiGetProcessorInfo	Get information on a specific CPU.
PeiStartupAllAPs	Activate all of the application processors.
PeiStartupThisAP	Activate a specific application processor.
PeiSwitchBSP	Switch the boot strap processor.
PeiEnableDisableAP	Enable or disable an application processor.
PeiWhoAmI	Identify the currently executing processor.

Code Flow

Here is proposed design flow with coreboot has implemented EFI_MP_SERVICES_PPI API and FSP will make use of the same to perform some CPU feature programming.

coreboot-FSP MP init flow coreboot-fsp mp init flow

Benefits

1. coreboot was using SkipMpInit=1 which will skip entire FSP CPU feature programming. With proposed model, coreboot will make use of SkipMpInit=0 which will allow to run all Silicon recommended CPU programming.
2. CPU feature programming inside FSP will be more transparent than before as it’s using coreboot interfaces to execute those programming.
3. coreboot will have more control over running those feature programming as API optimization handled by coreboot.