Re: [PATCH] efi/libstub/fdt: Standardize the names of EFI stub parameters

[Mark Rutland <mark.rutland@arm.com>]

> > C) When you could go:
> > 
> >    DT -> Discover Xen -> Xen-specific stuff -> Xen-specific EFI/ACPI discovery
> 
> I take you mean discovering Xen with the usual Xen hypervisor node on
> device tree. I think that C) is a good option actually. I like it. Not
> sure why we didn't think about this earlier. Is there anything EFI or
> ACPI which is needed before Xen support is discovered by
> arch/arm64/kernel/setup.c:setup_arch -> xen_early_init()?

Currently lots (including the memory map). With the stuff to support
SPCR, the ACPI discovery would be moved before xen_early_init().

> If not, we could just go for this. A lot of complexity would go away.

I suspect this would still be fairly complex, but would at least prevent
the Xen-specific EFI handling from adversely affecting the native case.

> > D) If you want to be generic:
> >    EFI -> EFI application -> EFI tables -> ACPI tables -> Xen-specific stuff
> >           \------------------------------------------/
> > 	   (virtualize these, provide shims to Dom0, but handle
> > 	    everything in Xen itself)
> 
> I think that this is good in theory but could turn out to be a lot of
> work in practice. We could probably virtualize the RuntimeServices but
> the BootServices are troublesome.

What's troublesome with the boot services?

What can't be simulated?

> > E) Partially-generic option:
> >    EFI -> EFI application -> Xen detected by registered GUID -> Xen-specific EFI bootloader stuff -> OS in Xen-specific configuration
> > 
> > 
> > > > > In any case this should be separate from the shim ABI discussion.
> > > > 
> > > > I disagree; I think this is very much relevant to the ABI discussion.
> > > > That's not to say that I insist on a particular approach, but I think
> > > > that they need to be considered together.
> > > 
> > > Let's suppose Xen didn't expose any RuntimeServices at all, would that
> > > make it easier to discuss about the EFI stub parameters?
> > 
> > It would simply the protocol specific to Xen, certainly.
> > 
> > > In the grant scheme of things, they are not that important, as Ian
> > > wrote what is important is how to pass the RSDP.
> > 
> > Unfortunately we're still going to have to care about this eventually,
> > even if for something like kexec. So we still need to spec out the state
> > of things if this is going to be truly generic.
>  
> Fair enough. My position is that if we restrict this to RuntimeServices,
> it might be possible, but I still prefer C).

Regardless of what we do we still need a well-defined state here, which
brings us back to the initial problem eventually.

Thanks,
Mark.