[PATCH 29/30] efi/libstub: arm: reserve bootloader supplied initrd in memory map

[Ard Biesheuvel]

On 21 August 2017 at 11:37, Mark Rutland <mark.rutland at arm.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 14, 2017 at 01:54:10PM +0100, Ard Biesheuvel wrote:
>> Under KASLR, the EFI stub may allocate the kernel anywhere in the
>> physical address space, which could be right on top of an initrd
>> if it was supplied by the bootloader (i.e., GRUB) in /chosen rather
>> than passed via the initrd= command line option. So allocate the
>> pages explicitly, this ensures that the random memory allocation
>> routine will disregard the region.
>
> I'm a little confused. Shouldn't the bootloader have allocated that
> memory, leaving it reserved?
>
> If it hasn't, then that region could be allcoated by anything else at
> any time (e.g. by the code which loads the kernel, or some EFI timer
> callback), so that sounds like a bootloader bug that we can't fix.
>

Yeah, thinko on my part. Thanks for spotting that.