Tackling core lifecycle management in heterogeneous SoCs

Heterogeneous SoCs often employ a common pattern - Run Linux on the primary processor for system management tasks like boot sequencing, power management, firmware loading, and resource allocation, while Zephyr runs on auxiliary cores.

MCUBoot, as of now, lacks the ability to load or control cores other than the one that it is running on.

This can be tackled by porting remote processor framework (remoteproc) to Zephyr - to provide firmware lifecycle management, resource table handling, and capabilities to load binaries. We can also employ OpenAMP using RPMsg for communication.

We will use TI's AM2434 as our reference SoC. This presentation will cover the remoteproc framework architecture, reference driver and reference examples demonstrating peer-to-peer processor management.

This is especially beneficial for developing bootloader applications, so that one master core can boot up other remote cores with their specified programs.

This is also useful for runtime remote-core management, which can be potentially used with the power management framework as well.