On Wed, Feb 02, 2022 at 06:54:43AM +0000, Matthew Garrett wrote:

On Wed, Feb 02, 2022 at 07:10:02AM +0100, Greg KH wrote:

quoted

On Wed, Feb 02, 2022 at 04:01:57AM +0000, Matthew Garrett wrote:

quoted

We're talking about things that have massively different semantics.

I see lots of different platforms trying to provide access to their
"secure" firmware data to userspace in different ways.  That feels to me
like they are the same thing that userspace would care about in a
unified way.

EFI variables are largely for the OS to provide information to the 
firmware, while this patchset is to provide information from the 
firmware to the OS. I don't see why we'd expect to use the same userland 
tooling for both.

I totally agree, I'm not worried about EFI variables here, I don't know
why that came up.

In the broader case - I don't think we *can* use the same userland
tooling for everything. For example, the patches to add support for 
manipulating the Power secure boot keys originally attempted to make it 
look like efivars, but the underlying firmware semantics are 
sufficiently different that even exposing the same kernel interface 
wouldn't be a sufficient abstraction and userland would still need to 
behave differently. Exposing an interface that looks consistent but 
isn't is arguably worse for userland than exposing explicitly distinct 
interfaces.

So what does userspace really need here?  Just the ability to find if
the platform has blobs that it cares about, and how to read/write them.

I see different platform patches trying to stick these blobs in
different locations and ways to access (securityfs, sysfs, char device
node), which seems crazy to me.  Why can't we at least pick one way to
access these to start with, and then have the filesystem layout be
platform-specific as needed, which will give the correct hints to
userspace as to what it needs to do here?

thanks,

greg k-h