Re: [PATCH 2/3 v6] ACPI: allow longer device IDs

Andy Shevchenko
2022-02-28T21:28:02Z

On Mon, Feb 28, 2022 at 10:02:43PM +0100, Ard Biesheuvel wrote:
> On Mon, 28 Feb 2022 at 21:47, Andy Shevchenko <andy.shevchenko@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Mon, Feb 28, 2022 at 9:28 PM Jason A. Donenfeld <Jason@zx2c4.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > From: Alexander Graf <graf@amazon.com>
> > >
> > > We create a list of ACPI "PNP" IDs which contains _HID, _CID, and CLS
> > > entries of the respective devices. However, when making structs for
> > > matching, we squeeze those IDs into acpi_device_id, which only has 9
> > > bytes space to store the identifier. The subsystem actually captures the
> > > full length of the IDs, and the modalias has the full length, but this
> > > struct we use for matching is limited. It originally had 16 bytes, but
> > > was changed to only have 9 in 6543becf26ff ("mod/file2alias: make
> > > modalias generation safe for cross compiling"), presumably on the theory
> > > that it would match the ACPI spec so it didn't matter.
> >
> > > Unfortunately, while most people adhere to the ACPI specs, Microsoft
> > > decided that its VM Generation Counter device [1] should only be
> > > identifiable by _CID with a value of "VM_Gen_Counter", which is longer
> > > than 9 characters.
> >
> > Then why do we not see the ECR from somebody to update the spec or to
> > fix MS' abuse of it?
> > I believe _this_ should be the prerequisite to the proposed change.
>
> What exactly are you suggesting here? That the contributor of this
> patch joins the UEFI forum as an individual adopter in order to get
> the ACPI spec updated before we can advance with this patch? Or that
> he works with Microsoft to get them to refrain from violating it?
>
> I don't think that is reasonable or realistic. The kernel is already
> riddled with UEFI and ACPI quirks that are only there because some
> teams at MS don't take the ACPI spec too literally (which is why they
> have their own AML compiler, for one), and PC vendors only care about
> the Windows sticker, so they don't care about the ACPI spec either.
>
> So I don't think this is the right time to get pedantic about this.
> Our ACPI subsystem already deals with CIDs that are longer than 8
> characters (which are btw permitted by the ACPI spec for bus topology
> related metadata), the only thing being changed here is the ability to
> actually match against such identifiers.

My point is that this is clear abuse of the spec and:
1) we have to enable the broken, because it is already in the wild with
the comment that this is an issue

AND

2) issue an ECR / work with MS to make sure they understand the problem.

This can be done in parallel. What I meant as a prerequisite is to start doing
2) while we have 1) on table.

--
With Best Regards,
Andy Shevchenko