UEFI stands for "Unified Extensible Firmware Interface", where "Firmware"
is an ancient African word meaning "Why do something right when you can
do it so wrong that children will weep and brave adults will cower before
you", and "UEI" is Celtic for "We missed DOS so we burned it into your
ROMs". The UEFI specification provides for runtime services (ie, another
way for the operating system to be forced to depend on the firmware) and
we rely on these for certain trivial tasks such as setting up the
bootloader. But some hardware fails to work if we attempt to use these
runtime services from physical mode, and so we have to switch into virtual
mode. So far so dreadful.
The specification makes it clear that the operating system is free to do
whatever it wants with boot services code after ExitBootServices() has been
called. SetVirtualAddressMap() can't be called until ExitBootServices() has
been. So, obviously, a whole bunch of EFI implementations call into boot
services code when we do that. Since we've been charmingly naive and
trusted that the specification may be somehow relevant to the real world,
we've already stuffed a picture of a penguin or something in that address
space. And just to make things more entertaining, we've also marked it
non-executable.
This patch allocates the boot services regions during EFI init and makes
sure that they're executable. Then, after SetVirtualAddressMap(), it
discards them and everyone lives happily ever after. Except for the ones
who have to work on EFI, who live sad lives haunted by the knowledge that
someone's eventually going to write yet another firmware specification.
[ hpa: adding this to urgent with a stable tag since it fixes currently-broken
hardware. However, I do not know what the dependencies are and so I do
not know which -stable versions this may be a candidate for. ]
Signed-off-by: Matthew Garrett <mjg@redhat.com>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1306331593-28715-1-git-send-email-mjg@redhat.com
Signed-off-by: H. Peter Anvin <hpa@linux.intel.com>
Cc: Tony Luck <tony.luck@intel.com>
Cc: <stable@kernel.org>
916f676f8d