Entry tags:

advogato, fedora

I wrote about some EFI implementation issues I'd seen on Macs a while back. Shortly afterwards we started seeing approximately identical bugs on some Intel reference platforms, and fixing it actually became more of a priority.

The fundamental problem is the same. We take the EFI memory map, identify the virtual addresses of the regions that will be required for runtime (mapping them into virtual address space if needed) and then call the firmware's SetVirtualAddressMap() implementation in order to let the firmware convert all its pointers. Sadly it seems that some firmware implementations call into sections of boot services code to do this, which is unfortunate because we've already taken that back to use as RAM. So, given that this is clearly against the spec, how does it ever work?

The tediously dull version is that Linux typically calls SetVirtualAddressMap() in the kernel, and everyone else does it in their bootloaders. The bootloader hasn't set up NX bits or anything, so it just happens to work there. We could just do it in the bootloader in Linux, but that makes doing things like kernel address space randomisation trickier, so it's not the favoured approach. So, instead, we can probably just reserve those ranges until after we've switched to virtual mode, and make sure the pages are executable. This ought to land in 2.6.40, or whatever it ends up being called.

(The alternative approach, of just never transitioning to physical mode, turns out to mysteriously fail on various machines. Calls to SetVariable() just give errors. We just don't know)

That still leaves the problem of SetVariable() on the test Mac trying to access a random address. That one turned out to be easier. There's 2MB of flash at the top of physical address space, and this was being presented as being broken into four separate EFI regions. While physically contiguous, Linux was mapping these to discontiguous virtual addresses. Apple's firmware appeared to assume that a pointer into one region could just be incremented into another. So because it's still easier to change the kernel than change Apple, 2.6.39 merges these regions to ensure they're contiguous.

Remaining problems include some machines seemingly not booting if they have 4GB of RAM or more and this Apple failing to communicate with its panel over the eDP auxchannel. Anyone got any idea how to dump the bios compatibility module out of a running EFI session?