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Ard Biesheuvel authored
The EFI handover protocol permits a bootloader to invoke the kernel as a EFI PE/COFF application, while passing a bootparams struct as a third argument to the entrypoint function call. This has no basis in the UEFI specification, and there are better ways to pass additional data to a UEFI application (UEFI configuration tables, UEFI variables, UEFI protocols) than going around the StartImage() boot service and jumping to a fixed offset in the loaded image, just to call a different function that takes a third parameter. The reason for handling struct bootparams in the bootloader was that the EFI stub could only load initrd images from the EFI system partition, and so passing it via struct bootparams was needed for loaders like GRUB, which pass the initrd in memory, and may load it from anywhere, including from the network. Another motivation was EFI mixed mode, which could not use the initrd loader in the EFI stub at all due to 32/64 bit incompatibilities (which will be fixed shortly [0]), and could not invoke the ordinary PE/COFF entry point either, for the same reasons. Given that loaders such as GRUB already carried the bootparams handling in order to implement non-EFI boot, retaining that code and just passing bootparams to the EFI stub was a reasonable choice (although defining an alternate entrypoint could have been avoided.) However, the GRUB side changes never made it upstream, and are only shipped by some of the distros in their downstream versions. In the meantime, EFI support has been added to other Linux architecture ports, as well as to U-boot and systemd, including arch-agnostic methods for passing initrd images in memory [1], and for doing mixed mode boot [2], none of them requiring anything like the EFI handover protocol. So given that only out-of-tree distro GRUB relies on this, let's permit it to be omitted from the build, in preparation for retiring it completely at a later date. (Note that systemd-boot does have an implementation as well, but only uses it as a fallback for booting images that do not implement the LoadFile2 based initrd loading method, i.e., v5.8 or older) [0] https://lore.kernel.org/all/20220927085842.2860715-1-ardb@kernel.org/ [1] ec93fc37 ("efi/libstub: Add support for loading the initrd from a device path") [2] 97aa2765 ("efi/x86: Add true mixed mode entry point into .compat section") Signed-off-by: Ard Biesheuvel <ardb@kernel.org> Signed-off-by: Borislav Petkov <bp@suse.de> Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20221122161017.2426828-18-ardb@kernel.org
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