Re: [PATCH v2] x86/mm: warn on W+x mappings

[Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org>]

On Wed, Oct 14, 2015 at 05:19:40PM +0200, Ingo Molnar wrote:
> 
> * Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org> wrote:
> 
> > On Mon, Oct 12, 2015 at 04:17:54PM +0200, Ingo Molnar wrote:
> > > * Matt Fleming <matt@codeblueprint.co.uk> wrote:
> > > > On Mon, 12 Oct, at 02:49:36PM, Ingo Molnar wrote:
> > > > > So why not unmap them after bootup? Is there any reason to call into EFI code 
> > > > > while the system is up and running?
> > > > 
> > > > That's where the runtime services code lives. So if you want things like EFI 
> > > > variables (used by the distro installer, among other things) you need to map the 
> > > > runtime regions.
> > > 
> > > So EFI variables could be queried during bootup and saved on the Linux side.
> > 
> > That wouldn't support writing to EFI variables.  Or using the EFI
> > capsule update system to update firmware.
> 
> Well, if we know the location of those pages then we could map those 'rw-' - while 
> the rest would be mapped 'r-x'.

We have no way to do so in the absence of the additional code/data
separation information provided by more recent firmware.

- Josh Triplett