[PATCH v9 02/11] efi_loader: Add a test app

[Simon Glass]

Hi Tom,

On Tue, 29 Oct 2024 at 21:13, Tom Rini <trini at konsulko.com> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Oct 29, 2024 at 08:22:10PM +0100, Simon Glass wrote:
>
> > Add a simple app to use for testing. This is intended to do whatever it
> > needs to for testing purposes. For now it just prints a message and
> > exits boot services.
> >
> > There was a considerable amount of discussion about whether it is OK to
> > call exit-boot-services and then return to U-Boot. This is not normally
> > done in a real application, since exit-boot-services is used to
> > completely disconnect from U-Boot. However, since this is a test, we
> > need to check the results of running the app, so returning is necessary.
> > It works correctly and it provides a nice model of how to test the EFI
> > code in a simple way.
> >
> > Signed-off-by: Simon Glass <sjg at chromium.org>
>
> This approach has been specifically rejected with an explained
> rationale: It breaks how UEFI applications work and you cannot run
> further UEFI tests in sandbox without resetting.
>
> Since as you note, you can't reset in a C-based test, rework this to be
> a python test where we can safely reset the system and verify that. I
> believe Heinrich even noted that a test which checks ExitBootServices()
> working as expected would be helpful as we only have a watchdog test
> currently.

Unfortunately I believe this is the wrong direction, as we are unable
to check the state of anything once a reset has happened. Thus I
cannot build on this test, e.g. to see what happened to the devices
and whether they are still bound. It becomes just a 'black box' test.
None of the other bootflow tests work this way, BTW.

Regards,
Simon