It is late in my timezone, so please excuse that I respond only to the
part that I feel is most critical to drive this forward.

On Tue, 16 Nov 2021 at 23:52, Darius Rad <darius@...> wrote:

It was my expectation that the current iteration of the committee would
first and foremost be defining what a platform is. That is, coming up with
a clear and concise set of terminology, as well as a common structure and
framework for how platforms are defined. In the course of doing that, the
committee would also define a small number of concrete platforms (i.e.,
OS-A and M).

The closest thing that exists along those lines is the Platform Policy,
which in my opinion falls short in a number of ways. It is been my
observation that this shortcoming has created unnecessary confusion and
numerous fruitless discussions. Just in the last few weeks, there have
been discussions on the mailing list (regarding consistent terminology, and
concrete vs. intent requirements) that seems to me could have been
completely avoided with a better overall definition of a platform. I
suspect if you asked everyone in the committee "what is a platform", you
would get as many different answers, with some similarities, and,
crucially, some conflicting ideas.

Well said and no disagreement there.

In fact, I have suggested to the committee leadership to improve on
these introductory sections and to improve the self-consistency in
doing so.
Unless we clearly answer basic questions—such as "What is a
Platform?", "What market segments and use cases does the give Platform
address?", "What is the Platform implementation vs. what is compatible
software?", etc.—we are clearly not done.

I expect that these structural topics will receive more attention in
the near future and would appreciate your assistance in closing these
gaps in the documents.
Let us sync up following the next Platform HSC (from my understanding,
some of the work to address these opens will be distributed then), so
I can get your feedback into the process.

With respect to the M / CSI platform, I think there are fundamental
questions that need a clear, definitive answer (in the specification, not
off hand in a meeting or email), in order to guide the process. Not least
of which is "what is a platform".

I have made comments and proposed edits to the policy document that have
been unanswered for a month. This has happened multiple times, and is
ongoing. I have also mentioned, multiple times, on this mailing list, that
I believe that the process for revising the policy document is cumbersome
and, more importantly, not working.

I must admit that I have not been following the deliberations
regarding the comments on the Policy (to my knowledge Kumar has been
looking into these), even though I am very interested in this topic,
as I helped draft the Policy document.
Let me reach out to the TPMs at RISC-V to see what the expected
process for dealing with comments against an approved Policy are.

Thanks,
Philipp.