Re: [BUG]: DELL XPS 8500 become a brick after fill too many entriesto nvram.

From: Matt Fleming
Date: Wed Nov 13 2013 - 06:21:35 EST


On Mon, 11 Nov, at 08:38:31PM, Madper Xie wrote:
>
> matt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx writes:
>
> > On Mon, 11 Nov, at 02:15:22PM, Madper Xie wrote:
> >> Howdy all,
> >> For now we ensure at least ~5kb free space. But my dell xps still
> >> become a brick after I add too many entries to my nvram. So maybe 5kb
> >> is not safe enough. and 5kb is just aginst Samsung's laptop.
> >> So should we enlarge EFI_MIN_RESERVE?
> >
> > Urgh.............
> >
> > Thanks for the report. Could you provide some more details?
> >
> > - Is your machine definitely bricked?
> Yes, pretty sure. After I press power button, the screen shows "DELL"
> and hangs. I can't step into any configure interface and the keyboard is
> dead. (NumLock led on, and I can't turn it off.) Of course my kernel
> won't be loaded. The only way to fix it is change the jump line which is
> on the motherboard.

OK, that's pretty conclusive. Thanks.

> > - Have you got a dmesg from the machine before it broke?
> No. But with a diagnostic kernel(without change the behavior of
> efi. Simply print total size and remain size when I write something to
> nvram. Provided by Lenny), I got following output:

Have you been able to calculate the safe limit of NVRAM we need to
reserve to avoid bricking your machine?

I was interested in the DMI and other firmware strings from dmesg.

--
Matt Fleming, Intel Open Source Technology Center
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