Ok, so having thought some more about the actual problem (ie, Samsungs go wrong if there's too much used space marked as being active, not merely too much used space) I think we really want to be looking for the amount of active space rather than the remaining space value that QueryVariableInfo() gives us. Something like this (absolutely untested, provided here for comment) patch? I'll try rigging something up under OVMF to test it. This version certainly seems a little over-naive, since it won't handle the case of a variable that's being overwritten with something of a different size. commit 263c2ee36c67dfa6d869304a3b5aef7a14f1ec4e Author: Matthew Garrett <matthew.garrett@xxxxxxxxxx> Date: Mon Mar 25 13:40:28 2013 -0400 efi: Distinguish between "remaining space" and actually used space EFI implementations distinguish between space that is actively used by a variable and space that merely hasn't been garbage collected yet. Space that hasn't yet been garbage collected isn't available for use and so isn't counted in the remaining_space field returned by QueryVariableInfo(). Combined with commit 68d9298 this can cause problems. Some implementations don't garbage collect until the remaining space is smaller than the maximum variable size, and as a result check_var_size() will always fail once more than 50% of the variable store has been used even if most of that space is marked as available for garbage collection. The user is unable to create new variables, and deleting variables doesn't increase the remaining space. The problem that 68d9298 was attempting to avoid was one where certain platforms fail if the actively used space is greater than 50% of the available storage space. We should be able to calculate that by simply summing the size of each available variable and subtracting that from the total storage space. With luck this will fix the problem described in https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=55471 without permitting damage to occur to the machines 68d9298 was attempting to fix. Signed-off-by: Matthew Garrett <matthew.garrett@xxxxxxxxxx> diff --git a/drivers/firmware/efivars.c b/drivers/firmware/efivars.c index 7acafb8..731ac7b 100644 --- a/drivers/firmware/efivars.c +++ b/drivers/firmware/efivars.c @@ -436,9 +436,12 @@ static efi_status_t check_var_size_locked(struct efivars *efivars, u32 attributes, unsigned long size) { - u64 storage_size, remaining_size, max_size; + u64 storage_size, remaining_size, max_size, active_available; + struct efivar_entry *entry; + struct efi_variable *var; efi_status_t status; const struct efivar_operations *fops = efivars->ops; + unsigned long active_size = 0; if (!efivars->ops->query_variable_info) return EFI_UNSUPPORTED; @@ -449,8 +452,16 @@ check_var_size_locked(struct efivars *efivars, u32 attributes, if (status != EFI_SUCCESS) return status; + list_for_each_entry(entry, &efivars->list, list) { + var = &entry->var; + get_var_data_locked(efivars, var); + active_size += var->DataSize; + } + + active_available = storage_size - active_size; + if (!storage_size || size > remaining_size || size > max_size || - (remaining_size - size) < (storage_size / 2)) + (active_available - size) < (storage_size / 2)) return EFI_OUT_OF_RESOURCES; return status; -- Matthew Garrett | mjg59@xxxxxxxxxxxxx -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-efi" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html