On Fri, Aug 20, 2021 at 03:46:11PM +0000, David Laight wrote: > So load a temporary IDT so that you can detect invalid instructions > and restore the UEFI IDT immediately afterwards? Going forward with SEV-SNP, the IDT is not only needed for special instructions, but also to detect when the hypervisor is doing fishy things with the guests memory, which could happen at _any_ instruction boundary. > I'm guessing the GDT is changed in order to access all of physical > memory (well enough to load the kernel). The kernels GDT is needed to switch from 32-bit protected mode to long mode, where it calls ExitBootServices(). I think the reason is to avoid compiling a 64-bit and a 32-bit EFI library into the decompressor stub. With a 32-bit library the kernel could call ExitBootServices() right away before it jumps to startup_32. But it only has the 64-bit library, so it has to switch to long-mode first before it make subsequent EFI calls. > Could that be done using the LDT? > It is unlikely that the UEFI cares about that? Well, I guess it could work via the LDT too, but the current GDT switching code if proven to work on exiting BIOSes and I'd rather not change it to something less proven when there is no serious problem with it. > Is this 32bit non-paged code? > Running that with a physical memory offset made my head hurt. Yes, 32-bit EFI launches the kernel in 32-bit protected mode, paging disabled. I think that it also has to use a flat segmentation model without offsets. But someone who knows the EFI spec better than me can correct me here :) Regards, Joerg
