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SubjectRe: [regression, bisected] x86: efi: Pass boot services variable info to runtime code
On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 05:57:31PM -0500, Russ Anderson wrote:
> On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 05:28:16PM +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> > If nvram becaomes full, some
> > systems crash during firmware initialisation. So we can't let nvram
> > become full. The obvious thing to do here is to look at the values from
> > QueryVariableInfo, but many systems won't perform any garbage collection
> > until they're almost out of space and so variables that have been
> > deleted still show up as used space.
>
> OK. I get nvram looks full due to lack of garbage collection
> on some systems. Does QueryVariableInfo (at runtime) tell you
> it is full? Is the problem that it says it is full when it
> is not, or does not tell you it is full when it is?

QueryVariableInfo reports the amount used *including garbage*. This
makes it useless for determining how much space is available for the
firmware to use.

> > We can work around that by adding
> > up the size of the variables ourselves, but that only gives us the value
> > for runtime-visible variables. We also need to know how much space is
> > used by variables that are only visible during boot,
>
> Is it valid to assume that only the kernel writes to nvram at
> runtime? Can bios log error information to nvram on an SMM
> interrupt (for example)?

There's a limited number of situations where the firmware can write to
nvram, but they're basically uninteresting. Practically speaking, it's
always via the kernel once ExitBootServices() has been called.

> > hence calling
> > QueryVariableInfo before ExitBootServices.
>
> Correct me if I am wrong, but that is called from EFI stubs,
> which is only used by some bootloaders (sometimes grub2).
> Does that mean EFI/grub and EFI/elilo will not hit the problem,
> or will not have your fix?

Will not have the fix. Boot EFI systems via the EFI stub.

--
Matthew Garrett | mjg59@srcf.ucam.org


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