[SeaBIOS] Saving a few bytes across a reboot

Igor Mammedov imammedo at redhat.com
Thu Jan 11 16:52:01 CET 2018


On Thu, 11 Jan 2018 09:29:14 -0500
Stefan Berger <stefanb at linux.vnet.ibm.com> wrote:

> On 01/11/2018 09:02 AM, Laszlo Ersek wrote:
> > On 01/11/18 13:40, Igor Mammedov wrote:  
> >> On Wed, 10 Jan 2018 17:45:52 +0100
> >> Laszlo Ersek <lersek at redhat.com> wrote:  
> >>> (My understanding is that the guest has to populate the CRB, and then
> >>> kick the hypervisor, so at least the register used for kicking must be
> >>> in MMIO (or IO) space. And firmware cannot allocate MMIO or IO space
> >>> (for platform devices). Thus, the register block must reside at a
> >>> QEMU-determined GPA. Once we do that, why bother about RAM allocation?)  
> >> MMIO doesn't have to be fixed nor exist at all, we could use
> >> linker write to file operation in FW for switching from guest
> >> to QEMU. That's obviously intrusive work for FW and QEMU
> >> compared to hardcodded address in both QEMU and FW but as
> >> benefit changes to QEMU and FW don't have to be tightly coupled
> >> and layout could be changed whenever need arises.  
> > Marc-André wrote, "The [CRB] region is registered at the same address as
> > TIS (it's not entirely clear from the spec it is supposed to be there,
> > but my laptop tpm use the same)."
> >
> > And, the spec declares the register block at the fixed range
> > FED4_0000h-FED4_4FFFh.
> >
> > How about this:
> >
> > (1) stick with the TPM specs and implement the TIS and/or CRB interfaces,
> >
> > (2) *except* make the base address of the register block a compat
> > property for the QEMU device,
> >
> > (3) generate data tables (TPM2) and AML tables (SSDT/_DSM) that expose
> > the device to the guest OS as ACPI or ACPI+CRB (i.e., "fTPM"), *not* TIS
> > and/or CRB  
> 
> Why? Linux doesn't use this type of interface. Actually, for the TIS the 
> base address has been hard coded as well.
> 
> >
> > (4) in the generated ACPI payload, adhere to the compat property (i.e.,
> > generate the base address values from the compat prop),
> >
> > (5) expose the base address stand-alone in a new fw_cfg file as well.
> >
> >
> > Benefits as I see it:
> >
> > - register block can move around from one QEMU release to next,  
> 
> Why would we need that?  fed4_0000 is presumably reserved for TPM device 
> interfaces and shouldn't clash with anything in the future.
I wouldn't bet on not clashing as it's a separate spec and another
non TPM spec could use this address as well.
Laszlo's suggestion to use fwcfg file for MMIO base should take care
in case base would need to be changed.

> With the PPI 
> memory at ffff_0000 - ffff_00ffI am not so sure. Here we could use the 
> proposed QEMU ACPI table

> and a hard-coded address, ffff_0000 at the  beginning.
if we would have hard codded address for starters, it would mean
that layout can't be changed since old firmware /with fixed address/
will break when address is changed on QEMU side, hence QEMU would
have to maintain initially fixed address practically forever.

> Would that not solve it? Why not?

> 
> >
> > - migration remains functional (ACPI comes from source host, but it
> >    matches the device model on the target host, due to the compat prop),
> >
> > - firmware remains dumb about TPM activations (OS calls ACPI calls
> >    virtual hardware),  
> 
> Linux doesn't use the ACPI interface from what I can tell.
> 
> What are 'TPM activations'? We have a TIS interface for example that 
> SeaBIOS uses to initialize the TPM1.2 / TPM2.
> 
> 
> >
> > - the ACPI-to-hardware interface is dictated by an industry spec, so we  
> 
> Do you have a pointer to this spec?
> 
> 
> >    don't have to invent and document a paravirtual interface. If it ever
> >    becomes necessary for the firmware to directly access the TPM
> >    hardware (for example, to replay physical presence commands queued by
> >    the OS), fw can rely on the same industry spec, only the base address
> >    has to be updated -- which is available stand-alone from the named
> >    fw_cfg file.  
> 
> 
> >
> > Thanks
> > Laszlo
> >  
> 




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