[PATCH v5 0/8] efi: implement generic compressed boot support

From: Ard Biesheuvel
Date: Sat Sep 10 2022 - 04:12:26 EST


Relatively modern architectures such as arm64 or RISC-V don't implement
a self-decompressing kernel, and leave it up to the bootloader to
decompress the compressed image before executing it. For bare metal
boot, this policy makes sense, as a self-decompressing image essentially
duplicates a lot of fiddly preparation work to create a 1:1 mapping and
set up the C runtime, and to discover or infer where DRAM lives from
device trees or other firmware tables.

For EFI boot, the situation is a bit different: the EFI entrypoint is
called with a 1:1 cached mapping covering all of DRAM already active,
and with a stack, a heap, a memory map and boot services to load and
start images. This means it is rather trivial to implement a
self-decompressing wrapper for EFI boot in a generic manner, and reuse
it across architectures that implement EFI boot.

The only slight downside is that when UEFI secure boot is enabled, the
generic LoadImage/StartImage only allow signed images to be loaded and
started, and we would prefer to avoid the need to sign both the inner
and outer PE/COFF images.

However, the only truly generic and portable way to achieve this is to
rely on LoadImage/StartImage as the EFI spec defines them, and avoid
making assumptions about how things might work under the hood, and how
we might circumvent that. This includes just loading the image into
memory and jumping to the PE entry point: in the context of secure boot,
measured boot and other hardening measures the firmware may take (such
as disallowing mappings that are both writable and executable), using
the firmware's image loading API is the only maintainable choice.

For this reason, this version of the series includes support for signing
the images using sbsign, if the signing key and cert are specified in
Kconfig.

The code is wired up for arm64, LoongArch and RISC-V. The latter was
build tested only.

Changes since v4:
- make CONFIG_EFI_ZBOOT user selectable again, and turn it on by default
only for LoongArch
- set KBUILD_IMAGE to vmlinuz.efi if CONFIG_EFI_ZBOOT=y, so that make
targets such as zinstall and bindeb-pkg do the right thing
- throw an error is BSS was not cleared by the loader - this is needed
to detect broken distro implementations of LoadImage in shim and grub
- add vmlinuz.* to .gitignore on the various architectures
- switch back to defining uncompressed_size as 'extern __aligned(1)' so
that the compiler will perform the unaligned access as appropriate on
the architecture in question - this requires the latest binutils on
LoongArch [0]

Changes since v3:
- add support for XZ and ZSTD compression
- deal with exit data returned by StartImage()
- use LoadFile2 based image loading instead of passing the raw buffer -
this way, the provenance of the data is more visible, allowing us,
for instance, to deal with initrd= on arm64 transparently (this means
that systemd-boot on arm64 will work unmodified provided that the
[deprecated] command line initrd loader is enabled in the kernel
build)
- include LoongArch support
- rename compressed image to vmlinuz.efi on all architectures

Changes since v2:
- drop some of the refactoring work to make efi_printk() available in
the decompressor, and just use fixed strings instead;
- provide memcpy/memmove/memset based on the UEFI boot services, instead
of having to specify for each architecture how to wire these up;
- drop PI/DXE based signature check circumvention, and just sign the
inner image instead, if needed;
- add a header to the zimage binary that identifies it as a EFI zboot
image, and describes the compression algorithm and where the payload
lives in the image - this might be used by non-EFI loaders to locate
and decompress the bare metal image, given that the EFI zboot one is
not a hybrid like the one it encapsulates.

[0] https://sourceware.org/pipermail/binutils/2022-September/122713.html

Cc: "James E.J. Bottomley" <James.Bottomley@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: Matthew Garrett <mjg59@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: Peter Jones <pjones@xxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: Ilias Apalodimas <ilias.apalodimas@xxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: Heinrich Schuchardt <heinrich.schuchardt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: AKASHI Takahiro <takahiro.akashi@xxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: Palmer Dabbelt <palmer@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: Atish Patra <atishp@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: Arnd Bergmann <arnd@xxxxxxxx>
Cc: Huacai Chen <chenhuacai@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: Xi Ruoyao <xry111@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: Lennart Poettering <lennart@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: Jeremy Linton <jeremy.linton@xxxxxxx>
Cc: Will Deacon <will@xxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas@xxxxxxx>

Ard Biesheuvel (8):
efi: name the ARCH-stub.c files uniformly
efi/libstub: add some missing EFI prototypes
efi/libstub: use EFI provided memcpy/memset routines
efi/libstub: move efi_system_table global var into separate object
efi/libstub: implement generic EFI zboot
arm64: efi: enable generic EFI compressed boot
riscv: efi: enable generic EFI compressed boot
loongarch: efi: enable generic EFI compressed boot

arch/arm64/Makefile | 9 +-
arch/arm64/boot/.gitignore | 1 +
arch/arm64/boot/Makefile | 6 +
arch/arm64/kernel/image-vars.h | 13 -
arch/loongarch/Kconfig | 1 +
arch/loongarch/Makefile | 4 +-
arch/loongarch/boot/.gitignore | 1 +
arch/loongarch/boot/Makefile | 6 +
arch/loongarch/kernel/image-vars.h | 3 -
arch/riscv/Makefile | 6 +-
arch/riscv/boot/.gitignore | 1 +
arch/riscv/boot/Makefile | 6 +
arch/riscv/kernel/image-vars.h | 9 -
drivers/firmware/efi/Kconfig | 38 +++
drivers/firmware/efi/libstub/Makefile | 21 +-
drivers/firmware/efi/libstub/Makefile.zboot | 70 +++++
drivers/firmware/efi/libstub/{arm32-stub.c => arm-stub.c} | 0
drivers/firmware/efi/libstub/efi-stub.c | 2 -
drivers/firmware/efi/libstub/efistub.h | 35 ++-
drivers/firmware/efi/libstub/file.c | 17 ++
drivers/firmware/efi/libstub/intrinsics.c | 30 ++
drivers/firmware/efi/libstub/systable.c | 8 +
drivers/firmware/efi/libstub/zboot-header.S | 143 ++++++++++
drivers/firmware/efi/libstub/zboot.c | 296 ++++++++++++++++++++
drivers/firmware/efi/libstub/zboot.lds | 43 +++
include/linux/efi.h | 13 +
26 files changed, 732 insertions(+), 50 deletions(-)
create mode 100644 drivers/firmware/efi/libstub/Makefile.zboot
rename drivers/firmware/efi/libstub/{arm32-stub.c => arm-stub.c} (100%)
create mode 100644 drivers/firmware/efi/libstub/intrinsics.c
create mode 100644 drivers/firmware/efi/libstub/systable.c
create mode 100644 drivers/firmware/efi/libstub/zboot-header.S
create mode 100644 drivers/firmware/efi/libstub/zboot.c
create mode 100644 drivers/firmware/efi/libstub/zboot.lds

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2.35.1