• Ard Biesheuvel's avatar
    efi: Put Linux specific magic number in the DOS header · 29636a5c
    Ard Biesheuvel authored
    GRUB currently relies on the magic number in the image header of ARM and
    arm64 EFI kernel images to decide whether or not the image in question
    is a bootable kernel.
    
    However, the purpose of the magic number is to identify the image as one
    that implements the bare metal boot protocol, and so GRUB, which only
    does EFI boot, is limited unnecessarily to booting images that could
    potentially be booted in a non-EFI manner as well.
    
    This is problematic for the new zboot decompressor image format, as it
    can only boot in EFI mode, and must therefore not use the bare metal
    boot magic number in its header.
    
    For this reason, the strict magic number was dropped from GRUB, to
    permit essentially any kind of EFI executable to be booted via the
    'linux' command, blurring the line between the linux loader and the
    chainloader.
    
    So let's use the same field in the DOS header that RISC-V and arm64
    already use for their 'bare metal' magic numbers to store a 'generic
    Linux kernel' magic number, which can be used to identify bootable
    kernel images in PE format which don't necessarily implement a bare
    metal boot protocol in the same binary. Note that, in the context of
    EFI, the MS-DOS header is only described in terms of the fields that it
    shares with the hybrid PE/COFF image format, (i.e., the MS-DOS EXE magic
    number at offset #0 and the PE header offset at byte offset #0x3c).
    Since we aim for compatibility with EFI only, and not with MS-DOS or
    MS-Windows, we can use the remaining space in the MS-DOS header however
    we want.
    
    Let's set the generic magic number for x86 images as well: existing
    bootloaders already have their own methods to identify x86 Linux images
    that can be booted in a non-EFI manner, and having the magic number in
    place there will ease any future transitions in loader implementations
    to merge the x86 and non-x86 EFI boot paths.
    
    Note that 32-bit ARM already uses the same location in the header for a
    different purpose, but the ARM support is already widely implemented and
    the EFI zboot decompressor is not available on ARM anyway, so we just
    disregard it here.
    Acked-by: default avatarLeif Lindholm <quic_llindhol@quicinc.com>
    Reviewed-by: default avatarDaniel Kiper <daniel.kiper@oracle.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarArd Biesheuvel <ardb@kernel.org>
    29636a5c
head.S 3 KB