• Matthew Garrett's avatar
    efi: Distinguish between "remaining space" and actually used space · 31ff2f20
    Matthew Garrett authored
    EFI implementations distinguish between space that is actively used by a
    variable and space that merely hasn't been garbage collected yet. Space
    that hasn't yet been garbage collected isn't available for use and so isn't
    counted in the remaining_space field returned by QueryVariableInfo().
    
    Combined with commit 68d92986 this can cause problems. Some implementations
    don't garbage collect until the remaining space is smaller than the maximum
    variable size, and as a result check_var_size() will always fail once more
    than 50% of the variable store has been used even if most of that space is
    marked as available for garbage collection. The user is unable to create
    new variables, and deleting variables doesn't increase the remaining space.
    
    The problem that 68d92986 was attempting to avoid was one where certain
    platforms fail if the actively used space is greater than 50% of the
    available storage space. We should be able to calculate that by simply
    summing the size of each available variable and subtracting that from
    the total storage space. With luck this will fix the problem described in
    https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=55471 without permitting
    damage to occur to the machines 68d92986 was attempting to fix.
    Signed-off-by: default avatarMatthew Garrett <matthew.garrett@nebula.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarMatt Fleming <matt.fleming@intel.com>
    31ff2f20
efi.c 29.3 KB