Re: [PATCHv7 00/14] mm, x86/cc: Implement support for unaccepted memory

[Kirill A. Shutemov]

On Tue, Aug 09, 2022 at 01:36:00PM +0200, Ard Biesheuvel wrote:
> On Tue, 9 Aug 2022 at 13:11, Kirill A. Shutemov
> <kirill.shutemov@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > On Sat, Jul 23, 2022 at 01:14:07PM +0200, Ard Biesheuvel wrote:
> > > On Thu, 21 Jul 2022 at 19:13, Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > > >
> > > > On 7/19/22 17:26, Marc Orr wrote:
> > > > > - Dave's suggestion to "2. Boot some intermediate thing like a
> > > > > bootloader that does acceptance ..." is pretty clever! So if upstream
> > > > > thinks this FW-kernel negotiation is not a good direction, maybe we
> > > > > (Google) can pursue this idea to avoid introducing yet another tag on
> > > > > our images.
> > > >
> > > > I'm obviously speaking only for myself here and not for "upstream" as a
> > > > whole, but I clearly don't like the FW/kernel negotiation thing.  It's a
> > > > permanent pain in our necks to solve a very temporary problem.
> > >
> > > EFI is basically our existing embodiment of this fw/kernel negotiation
> > > thing, and iff we need it, I have no objection to using it for this
> > > purpose, i.e., to allow the firmware to infer whether or not it should
> > > accept all available memory on behalf of the OS before exiting boot
> > > services. But if we don't need this, even better.
> >
> > FW/kernel negotiation does not work if there's a boot loader in the middle
> > that does ExitBootServices(). By the time kernel can announce if it
> > supports unaccepted memory there's nobody to announce to.
> >
> 
> Why would you want to support such bootloaders for TDX anyway? TDX
> heavily relies on measured boot abstractions and other things that are
> heavily tied to firmware.

I don't understand it either. And, yet, there's demand for it.

-- 
  Kiryl Shutsemau / Kirill A. Shutemov