Re: [PATCH] efivarfs: Iterate variables with increasing name buffer sizes

From: Ard Biesheuvel
Date: Thu Jan 25 2024 - 03:12:54 EST


On Wed, 24 Jan 2024 at 22:25, Peter Jones <pjones@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Jan 23, 2024 at 12:33 PM Tim Schumacher <timschumi@xxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > On 23.01.24 15:09, Ard Biesheuvel wrote:
> > > On Tue, 23 Jan 2024 at 14:55, Tim Schumacher <timschumi@xxxxxx> wrote:
> > >>
> > >> I'd rather avoid introducing deviations from the specifications on the
> > >> kernel side as well.
> > >
> > > Which specification would this deviate from?
> >
> > The preexisting comment claims "Per EFI spec", and it appears that I got
> > mislead by that. Neither the UEFI specification, nor the newest revision
> > of the EFI specification (which I guess is what would have been current
> > back in 2004, when this comment was introduced) seem to make any mention
> > of a maximum length for the variable name.
>
> Curiously, I can't find it in the 1.02 spec (the oldest I can find)
> either. When I inherited efibootmgr around 2013, this was a
> limitation there, but I don't see anything in that tree that claims
> it's a spec limitation either. My suspicion is this is a former
> Itanium firmware limit that got promoted to "the spec says" by word of
> mouth, or was in some very early ia64 implementation spec.
>

Also, the comment (and similar ones I've seen in the past) seem to
refer to the entire variable (name + payload) rather than just the
name.

So I am still leaning towards simply reducing this to 512 bytes.