[PATCH 00/10] arm64 kexec kernel patches V5

[Mark Rutland]

On Fri, Nov 07, 2014 at 10:41:11AM +0000, Ard Biesheuvel wrote:
> On 7 November 2014 11:16, Mark Rutland <mark.rutland at arm.com> wrote:
> > On Fri, Nov 07, 2014 at 12:41:45AM +0000, Grant Likely wrote:
> >> On Thu, Nov 6, 2014 at 3:08 PM, Mark Rutland <mark.rutland at arm.com> wrote:
> >> > On Thu, Nov 06, 2014 at 01:56:42AM +0000, Dave Young wrote:
> >> >> On 11/03/14 at 07:46pm, Mark Rutland wrote:
> >> >> > On Fri, Oct 31, 2014 at 07:52:09AM +0000, Dave Young wrote:
> >> >> > > Hi Geoff
> >> >> > >
> >> >> > > I tested your patches. The macihne is using spin-table cpu enable method
> >> >> > > so I tried maxcpus=1 as you suggested.
> >> >> > >
> >> >> > > There's below issues for me, thoughts?
> >> >> > >
> >> >> > > 1. For acpi booting there's no /proc/device-tree so kexec can not find dtb
> >> >> > > to use.
> >> >> >
> >> >> > Are you absolutely certain of this?
> >> >> >
> >> >> > To use ACPI, you must have booted via EFI, as the only mechanism for
> >> >> > finding the ACPI tables is via EFI. If booted via EFI, the stub will
> >> >> > have created a stub DTB if there is no provided DTB, to pass the command
> >> >> > line and pointers to EFI data structures. This stub DTB should be
> >> >> > present in the usual place.
> >> >>
> >> >> Mark, I used kexec-tools from Geoff's git tree, it will create dtb from procfs
> >> >> maybe I can pass external dtb to kexec-tools. What you mentioned should be true
> >> >> though but I have not get idea how to get the dtb which kernel is using for boot
> >> >> since it is not unflattened.
> >> >
> >> > Ah, sorry. I see the problem now. For ACPI you don't unflatten the tree,
> >> > so there's nothing to expose at in sysfs/procfs.
> >> >
> >> > Somehow we need to unflatten the DTB without exposing it to drivers,
> >> > such that it can be exposed to userspace in the usual place but drivers
> >> > don't being probing based off of it.
> >>
> >> Is that even necessary? If the tree isn't unflattened, then it is just
> >> a stub tree. There really isn't anything interesting in it.
> >
> > We need to UEFI properties [1] from /chosen to access the memory map and
> > system table (both of which are necessary to access any ACPI tables).
> >
> >> Kexec should recreate the tree from scratch in that case.
> >
> > I'm not sure if the required information is exposed to userspace
> > elsewhere. Ard, Leif?
> >
> 
> Personally, I think we should not be using /proc/device-tree at all,
> but instead retain the original blob in some way and expose that.

Grant took objection to that approach previously.

> We already have /sys/firmware/efi/systab which contains the physical
> addresses of the UEFI configuration tables. We should probably add an
> entry for the FDT there anyway, but we would still be looking at
> mmap(/dev/mem) to access it, which is not a practice we want to
> encourage, I suppose.

We should not encourage use of /dev/mem.

Using /sys/firmware/efi/systab doesn't get us the memory map though,
unless that's also exposed?

> Also, we *must* take the secure boot scenario into account. Booting
> with an arbitrary user generated DTB is nice, but if you are doing
> kexec without an initrd, for instance, it would also be nice if we
> could just reuse the existing DTB without bothering the user for it at
> all, which would be something we could also allow when running
> securely.

Secure boot has to be handled completely differently. That will require
new syscall support, in-kernel purgatory, and so on.

That should not affect the non-secureboot cases where a user wants to
load their own DTB (or other objects) into memory for the next OS (which
might not be Linux).

Mark.