• Ard Biesheuvel's avatar
    efi: random: Use 'ACPI reclaim' memory for random seed · 7d866e38
    Ard Biesheuvel authored
    EFI runtime services data is guaranteed to be preserved by the OS,
    making it a suitable candidate for the EFI random seed table, which may
    be passed to kexec kernels as well (after refreshing the seed), and so
    we need to ensure that the memory is preserved without support from the
    OS itself.
    
    However, runtime services data is intended for allocations that are
    relevant to the implementations of the runtime services themselves, and
    so they are unmapped from the kernel linear map, and mapped into the EFI
    page tables that are active while runtime service invocations are in
    progress. None of this is needed for the RNG seed.
    
    So let's switch to EFI 'ACPI reclaim' memory: in spite of the name,
    there is nothing exclusively ACPI about it, it is simply a type of
    allocation that carries firmware provided data which may or may not be
    relevant to the OS, and it is left up to the OS to decide whether to
    reclaim it after having consumed its contents.
    
    Given that in Linux, we never reclaim these allocations, it is a good
    choice for the EFI RNG seed, as the allocation is guaranteed to survive
    kexec reboots.
    
    One additional reason for changing this now is to align it with the
    upcoming recommendation for EFI bootloader provided RNG seeds, which
    must not use EFI runtime services code/data allocations.
    
    Cc: <stable@vger.kernel.org> # v4.14+
    Signed-off-by: default avatarArd Biesheuvel <ardb@kernel.org>
    Reviewed-by: default avatarIlias Apalodimas <ilias.apalodimas@linaro.org>
    7d866e38
random.c 3.05 KB