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From:   Ard Biesheuvel <ardb@kernel.org>
Date:   Tue, 21 Jun 2022 23:12:17 +0200
Message-ID: <CAMj1kXGPi+Cy-D8am8tr-rm8gbmUQ-G0bfibD3R3nx=rL7-XVw@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH v2 4/9] efi: pstore: Omit efivars caching EFI varstore
 access layer
To:     Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org>
Cc:     linux-efi <linux-efi@vger.kernel.org>,
        Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
        Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org>,
        Peter Jones <pjones@redhat.com>,
        Tony Luck <tony.luck@intel.com>,
        Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>,
        Ingo Molnar <mingo@redhat.com>, Borislav Petkov <bp@alien8.de>,
        Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@linux.intel.com>
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On Tue, 21 Jun 2022 at 23:00, Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Jun 21, 2022 at 05:36:18PM +0200, Ard Biesheuvel wrote:
> > Avoid the efivars layer and simply call the newly introduced EFI
> > varstore helpers instead. This simplifies the code substantially, and
> > also allows us to remove some hacks in the shared efivars layer that
> > were added for efi-pstore specifically.
> >
> > Since we don't store the name of the associated EFI variable into each
> > pstore record when enumerating them, we have to guess the variable name
> > it was constructed from at deletion time, since we no longer keep a
> > shadow copy of the variable store. To make this a bit more exact, store
> > the CRC-32 of the ASCII name into the pstore record's ECC region so we
> > can use it later to make an educated guess regarding the name of the EFI
> > variable.
>
> I wonder if pstore_record should have a "private" field for backends to
> use? That seems like it solve the need for overloading the ecc field,
> and allow for arbitrarily more information to be stored (i.e. store full
> efi var name instead of an easily-colliding crc32?)
>

We could easily add that - we'd just have to decide how to free the
memory it points to.