[U-Boot] [RFC 0/6] efi_loader: support runtime variable access via cache

[Heinrich Schuchardt]

On 6/5/19 6:21 AM, AKASHI Takahiro wrote:
> EBBR v1.0 section 2.5.3 says
>   Even when SetVariable() is not supported during runtime services,
>   firmware should cache variable names and values in EfiRuntimeServicesData
>   memory so that GetVariable() and GetNextVeriableName() can behave as
>   specified.
>
> This is an experimental patch set and the aim is to enable this feature.


Hello Takahiro,

thanks a lot for all the effort you put in this.

Reusing parts of env is a valid possibility but I am not sure if this is
the right approach for something that has to work at runtime.

I will need some time to layout my ideas of the design. Unfortunately I
am on a sea kayaking trip this weekend. So I may need until June 16th
for a thorough suggestion.

I have already picked the trivial patches from this patch series and
will put them into the next pull request.

http://git.denx.de/?p=u-boot-efi.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/tags/efi-2019-07-rc4-2

Best regards

Heinich

>
> Cache buffer is in the same format as U-Boot environment hash table,
> but we cannot use functions in hashtable.c partly because most of U-Boot
> code are not available at UEFI runtime and partly because entries in
> a table are allocated by malloc(), which are again not available
> at UEFI runtime. It is quite painful to modify exiting U-Boot code
> so as to make it executable at UEFI runtime.
>
> So I implemented a limited version of hsearch_r(). This may be
> a discussion. Given that there are not so many UEFI variables,
> we may want to use a simpler table format for caching.
>
> Known issues:
> * Currently I test this feature with a test which is temporarily embedded
>   in ExitBootServices.
> * After SetVirtualAddressMap, it won't work (TODO).
>   ConvertPointer was implemented here just for this future work.
> * So how can we test the feature?
>   We can't use "printenv" command as its relocation won't take place.
> * I see some Travis CI errors.
>   This is probably due to no storage configured for UEFI variables.
>
> Patch#1 to #4 are preparatory patches.
> Patch#5 is mainly for testing.
> Patch#6 is core part of this patch set.
>
> AKASHI Takahiro (5):
>   efi_loader: runtime: make SetVirtualAddressMap configurable
>   efi: add RuntimeServicesSupported variable
>   efi_loader: support convert_pointer at runtime
>   cmd: efidebug: add "boot exit" sub-command
>   efi_loader: variable: support runtime variable access via cache
>
> Alexander Graf (1):
>   efi_loader: Patch non-runtime code out at ExitBootServices already
>
>  cmd/efidebug.c                     |  63 ++++
>  include/efi_api.h                  |  15 +
>  include/efi_loader.h               |  22 ++
>  lib/efi_loader/Kconfig             |  24 ++
>  lib/efi_loader/efi_boottime.c      |  11 +-
>  lib/efi_loader/efi_runtime.c       | 155 ++++++++--
>  lib/efi_loader/efi_setup.c         |   5 +
>  lib/efi_loader/efi_variable.c      | 467 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>  test/py/tests/test_efi_selftest.py |   4 +-
>  9 files changed, 735 insertions(+), 31 deletions(-)
>