Re: [PATCH] arm64: defconfig: enable EFI_ARMSTUB_DTB_LOADER

[Olof Johansson]

On Thu, Aug 30, 2018 at 9:23 AM, Ard Biesheuvel
<ard.biesheuvel@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On 30 August 2018 at 17:06, Olof Johansson <olof@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 10:54 PM, Ard Biesheuvel
>> <ard.biesheuvel@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>> On 29 August 2018 at 20:59, Scott Branden <scott.branden@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>>> Hi Olof,
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On 18-08-29 11:44 AM, Olof Johansson wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> Hi,
>>>>>
>>>>> On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 10:21 AM, Scott Branden
>>>>> <scott.branden@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Enable EFI_ARMSTUB_DTB_LOADER to add support for the dtb= command line
>>>>>> parameter to function with efi loader.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Required to boot on existing bootloaders that do not support devicetree
>>>>>> provided by the platform or by the bootloader.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Fixes: 3d7ee348aa41 ("efi/libstub/arm: Add opt-in Kconfig option for the
>>>>>> DTB loader")
>>>>>> Signed-off-by: Scott Branden <scott.branden@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
>>>>>
>>>>> Why did Ard create an option for this if it's just going be turned on
>>>>> in default configs? Doesn't make sense to me.
>>>>>
>>>>> It would help to know what firmware still is crippled and how common
>>>>> it is, since it's been a few years that this has been a requirement by
>>>>> now.
>>>>
>>>> Broadcom NS2 and Stingray in current development and production need this
>>>> option in the kernel enabled in order to boot.
>>>
>>> And these production systems run mainline kernels in a defconfig configuration?
>>>
>>> The simply reality is that the DTB loader has been deprecated for a
>>> good reason: it was only ever intended as a development hack anyway,
>>> and if we need to treat the EFI stub provided DTB as a first class
>>> citizen, there are things we need to fix to make things works as
>>> expected. For instance, GRUB will put a property in the /chosen node
>>> for the initramfs which will get dropped if you boot with dtb=.
>>>
>>> Don't be surprised if some future enhancements of the EFI stub code
>>> depend on !EFI_ARMSTUB_DTB_LOADER. On UEFI systems, DTBs [or ACPI
>>> tables] are used by the firmware to describe itself and the underlying
>>> platform to the OS, and the practice of booting with DTB file images
>>> (taken from the kernel build as well) conflicts with that view. Note
>>> that GRUB still permits you to load DTBs from files (and supports more
>>> sources than just the file system the kernel Image was loaded from).
>>
>> Ard,
>>
>> Maybe a WARN() splat would be more useful as a phasing-out method than
>> removing functionality for them that needs to be reinstated through
>> changing the config?
>>
>
> We don't have any of that in the stub, and inventing new ways to pass
> such information between the stub and the kernel proper seems like a
> cart-before-horse kind of thing to me. The EFI stub diagnostic
> messages you get on the serial console are not recorded in the kernel
> log buffer, so they only appear if you actually look at the serial
> output.

Ah yeah. I suppose you could do it in the kernel later if you detect
you've booted through EFI with dtb= on the command line though.

>
>> Once the stub and the boot method is there, it's hard to undo as we
>> can see here. Being loud and warn might be more useful, and set a
>> timeline for hard removal (12 months?).
>>
>
> The dtb= handling is still there, it is just not enabled by default.
> We can keep it around if people are still using it. But as I pointed
> out, we may decide to make new functionality available only if it is
> disabled, and at that point, we'll have to choose between one or the
> other in defconfig, which is annoying.
>
>> Scott; an alternative for you is to do a boot wrapper that bundles a
>> DT and kernel, and boot that instead of the kernel image (outside of
>> the kernel tree). Some 32-bit platforms from Marvell use that. That
>> way the kernel will just see it as a normally passed in DT.
>>
>
> Or use GRUB. It comes wired up in all the distros, and let's you load
> a DT binary from anywhere you can imagine, as opposed to the EFI stub
> which can only load it if it happens to reside in the same file system
> (or even directory - I can't remember) as the kernel image. Note that
> the same reservations apply to doing that - the firmware is no longer
> able to describe itself to the OS via the DT, which is really the only
> conduit it has available on an arm64 system..

So, I've looked at the history here a bit, and dtb= support was
introduced in 2014. Nowhere does it say that it isn't a recommended
way of booting.

There are some firmware stacks today that modify and provide a
runtime-updated devicetree to the kernel, but there are also a bunch
who don't. Most "real" products will want a firmware that knows how to
pass in things such as firmware environment variables, or MAC
addresses, etc, to the kernel, but not all of them need it.

In particular, in a world where you want EFI to be used on embedded
platforms, requiring another bootloader step such as GRUB to be able
to reasonably boot said platforms seems like a significant and
unfortunate new limitation. Documentation/efi-stub.txt has absolutely
no indication that it is a second-class option that isn't expected to
be available everywhere. It doesn't really matter what _your_
intention was around it, if those who use it never found out and now
rely on it.

Unfortunately the way forward here is to revert 3d7ee348aa4127a.


-Olof