83e6818974
Originally 'efi_enabled' indicated whether a kernel was booted from
EFI firmware. Over time its semantics have changed, and it now
indicates whether or not we are booted on an EFI machine with
bit-native firmware, e.g. 64-bit kernel with 64-bit firmware.
The immediate motivation for this patch is the bug report at,
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-cdimage/+bug/1040557
which details how running a platform driver on an EFI machine that is
designed to run under BIOS can cause the machine to become
bricked. Also, the following report,
https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=47121
details how running said driver can also cause Machine Check
Exceptions. Drivers need a new means of detecting whether they're
running on an EFI machine, as sadly the expression,
if (!efi_enabled)
hasn't been a sufficient condition for quite some time.
Users actually want to query 'efi_enabled' for different reasons -
what they really want access to is the list of available EFI
facilities.
For instance, the x86 reboot code needs to know whether it can invoke
the ResetSystem() function provided by the EFI runtime services, while
the ACPI OSL code wants to know whether the EFI config tables were
mapped successfully. There are also checks in some of the platform
driver code to simply see if they're running on an EFI machine (which
would make it a bad idea to do BIOS-y things).
This patch is a prereq for the samsung-laptop fix patch.
Cc: David Airlie <airlied@linux.ie>
Cc: Corentin Chary <corentincj@iksaif.net>
Cc: Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org>
Cc: Dave Jiang <dave.jiang@intel.com>
Cc: Olof Johansson <olof@lixom.net>
Cc: Peter Jones <pjones@redhat.com>
Cc: Colin Ian King <colin.king@canonical.com>
Cc: Steve Langasek <steve.langasek@canonical.com>
Cc: Tony Luck <tony.luck@intel.com>
Cc: Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk <konrad@kernel.org>
Cc: Rafael J. Wysocki <rjw@sisk.pl>
Cc: <stable@vger.kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Matt Fleming <matt.fleming@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: H. Peter Anvin <hpa@linux.intel.com>
************************************************************
* For the very latest on DRI development, please see: *
* http://dri.freedesktop.org/ *
************************************************************
The Direct Rendering Manager (drm) is a device-independent kernel-level
device driver that provides support for the XFree86 Direct Rendering
Infrastructure (DRI).
The DRM supports the Direct Rendering Infrastructure (DRI) in four major
ways:
1. The DRM provides synchronized access to the graphics hardware via
the use of an optimized two-tiered lock.
2. The DRM enforces the DRI security policy for access to the graphics
hardware by only allowing authenticated X11 clients access to
restricted regions of memory.
3. The DRM provides a generic DMA engine, complete with multiple
queues and the ability to detect the need for an OpenGL context
switch.
4. The DRM is extensible via the use of small device-specific modules
that rely extensively on the API exported by the DRM module.
Documentation on the DRI is available from:
http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/Documentation
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=387
http://dri.sourceforge.net/doc/
For specific information about kernel-level support, see:
The Direct Rendering Manager, Kernel Support for the Direct Rendering
Infrastructure
http://dri.sourceforge.net/doc/drm_low_level.html
Hardware Locking for the Direct Rendering Infrastructure
http://dri.sourceforge.net/doc/hardware_locking_low_level.html
A Security Analysis of the Direct Rendering Infrastructure
http://dri.sourceforge.net/doc/security_low_level.html