Re: [PATCH v2] x86/kexec: Add EFI config table identity mapping for kexec kernel

Ard Biesheuvel
2023-08-06T09:00:31Z

On Sat, 5 Aug 2023 at 11:18, Borislav Petkov <bp@alien8.de> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Aug 03, 2023 at 01:11:54PM +0200, Ard Biesheuvel wrote:
> > Sadly, not only 'old' grubs - GRUB mainline only recently added
> > support for booting Linux/x86 via the EFI stub (because I wrote the
> > code for them),
>
> haha.
>
> > but it will still fall back to the previous mode for kernels that are
> > built without EFI stub support, or which are older than ~v5.8 (because
> > their EFI stub does not implement the generic EFI initrd loading
> > mechanism)
>
> The thing is, those SNP kernels pretty much use the EFI boot mechanism.
> I mean, don't take my word for it as I run SNP guests only from time to
> time but that's what everyone uses AFAIK.
>
> > Yeah. what seems to be saving our ass here is that startup_32 maps the
> > first 1G of physical address space 4 times, and x86_64 EFI usually
> > puts firmware tables below 4G. This means the cc blob check doesn't
> > fault, but it may dereference bogus memory traversing the config table
> > array looking for the cc blob GUID. However, the system table field
> > holding the size of the array may also appear as bogus so this may
> > still break in weird ways.
>
> Oh fun.
>

This is not actually true, I misread the code.

The initial mapping is 1:1 for the lower 4G of system memory, so
anything that lives there is accessible before the demand paging stuff
is up and running.

IOW, your change should be sufficient to fix this even when entering
via the 32-bit entry point.