On Thu, Jan 13, 2011 at 09:16:26AM -0800, Eric W. Biederman wrote: > Matthew Garrett <mjg at redhat.com> writes: > > > We're seeing issues with some Dell hardware when EFI is run in physical > > mode - it seems that Windows uses virtual mode, so the physical path is > > never exercised. I'm not sure that changing the default to physical is > > going to be possible without compatibility issues. > > The bootloaders use physical mode, and there shouldn't be a separate > physical vs virtual mode. It should be the same code with or without > relocations applied. At worst we can set virtual address to the > physical address, on buggy boards. Haven't we learned that failing to mimic Windows as closely as possible in firmware interactions is a recipe for immense disaster yet? We'll never successfully blacklist every broken machine. > Honestly if the problem is the EFI code is so buggy we can't use it > in physical mode the answer is almost certainly not to use the > buggy EFI code. Which would be fine, except... > The only bits that I don't think have an alternative are the firmware > variable accesses. Which are a nice to have, but not a show stopper > anywhere. It's not typically possible to set up the bootloader without EFI variable acccess. -- Matthew Garrett | mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org
