Bug: kexec on Lenovo ThinkPad T480 disables EFI mode

[Dave Young]

Hi,

On Sat, 5 Nov 2022 at 22:16, <ns at tfwno.gf> wrote:
>
> On 2022-11-05 05:49, Dave Young wrote:
> > Baoquan, thanks for cc me.
> >
> > On Sat, 5 Nov 2022 at 11:10, Baoquan He <bhe at redhat.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> Add Dave to CC
> >>
> >> On 10/28/22 at 01:02pm, ns at tfwno.gf wrote:
> >> > Greetings,
> >> >
> >> > I've been hitting a bug on my Lenovo ThinkPad T480 where kexecing will
> >> > cause EFI mode (if that's the right term for it) to be unconditionally
> >> > disabled, even when not using the --noefi option to kexec.
> >> >
> >> > What I mean by "EFI mode" being disabled, more than just EFI runtime
> >> > services, is that basically nothing about the system's EFI is visible
> >> > post-kexec. Normally you have a message like this in dmesg when the
> >> > system is booted in EFI mode:
> >> >
> >> > [    0.000000] efi: EFI v2.70 by EDK II
> >> > [    0.000000] efi: SMBIOS=0x7f98a000 ACPI=0x7fb7e000 ACPI 2.0=0x7fb7e014
> >> > MEMATTR=0x7ec63018
> >> > (obviously not the real firmware of the machine I'm talking about, but I
> >> > can also send that if it would be of any help)
> >> >
> >> > No such message pops up in my dmesg as a result of this bug, & this
> >> > causes some fallout like being unable to find the system's DMI
> >> > information:
> >> >
> >> > <6>[    0.000000] DMI not present or invalid.
> >> >
> >> > The efivarfs module also fails to load with -ENODEV.
> >> >
> >> > I've tried also booting with efi=runtime explicitly but it doesn't
> >> > change anything. The kernel still does not print the name of the EFI
> >> > firmware, DMI is still missing, & efivarfs still fails to load.
> >> >
> >> > I've been using the kexec_load syscall for all these tests, if it's
> >> > important.
> >> >
> >> > Also, to make it very clear, all this only ever happens post-kexec. When
> >> > booting straight from UEFI (with the EFI stub), all the aforementioned
> >> > stuff that fails works perfectly fine (i.e. name of firmware is printed,
> >> > DMI is properly found, & efivarfs loads & mounts just fine).
> >> >
> >> > This is reproducible with a vanilla 6.1-rc2 kernel. I've been trying to
> >> > bisect it, but it seems like it goes pretty far back. I've got vanilla
> >> > mainline kernel builds dating back to 5.17 that have the exact same
> >> > issue. It might be worth noting that during this testing, I made sure
> >> > the version of the kernel being kexeced & the kernel kexecing were the
> >> > same version. It may not have been a problem in older kernels, but that
> >> > would be difficult to test for me (a pretty important driver for this
> >> > machine was only merged during v5.17-rc4). So it may not have been a
> >> > regression & just a hidden problem since time immemorial.
> >> >
> >> > I am willing to test any patches I may get to further debug or fix
> >> > this issue, preferably based on the current state of torvalds/linux.git.
> >> > I can build & test kernels quite a few times per day.
> >> >
> >> > I can also send any important materials (kernel config, dmesg, firmware
> >> > information, so on & so forth) on request. I'll also just mention I'm
> >> > using kexec-tools 2.0.24 upfront, if it matters.
> >
> > Can you check the efi runtime in sysfs:
> > ls /sys/firmware/efi/runtime-map/
> >
> > If nothing then maybe you did not enable CONFIG_EFI_RUNTIME_MAP=y, it
> > is needed for kexec UEFI boot on x86_64.
>
> Oh my, it really is that simple.
>
> Indeed, enabling this in the pre-kexec kernel fixes it all up. I had
> blindly disabled it in my quest to downsize the pre-kexec kernel to
> reduce boot time (it only runs a bootloader). In hindsight, the firmware
> drivers section is not really a good section to tweak on a whim.
>
> I'm terribly sorry to have taken your time to "fix" this "bug". But I
> must ask, is there any reason why this is a visible config option, or at
> least not gated behind CONFIG_EXPERT? drivers/firmware/efi/runtime-map.c
> is pretty tiny, & considering it depends on CONFIG_KEXEC_CORE, one
> probably wants to have kexec work properly if they can even enable it.

Glad to know it works with the .config tweaking. I can not recall any
reason for that though.

Since it sits in the efi code path, let's see how Ard thinks about
your proposal.

Thanks
Dave