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Michael Brown 182ee90931 [efi] Work around broken boot services table manipulation by UEFI shim 
The UEFI shim installs wrappers around several boot services functions
before invoking its next stage bootloader, in an attempt to enforce
its desired behaviour upon the aforementioned bootloader.  For
example, shim checks that the bootloader has either invoked
StartImage() or has called into the "shim lock protocol" before
allowing an ExitBootServices() call to proceed.

When invoking a shim, iPXE will also install boot services function
wrappers in order to work around assorted bugs in the UEFI shim code
that would otherwise prevent it from being used to boot a kernel.  For
details on these workarounds, see commits 28184b7 ("[efi] Add support
for executing images via a shim") and 5b43181 ("[efi] Support versions
of shim that perform SBAT verification").

Using boot services function wrappers in this way is not intrinsically
problematic, provided that wrappers are installed before starting the
wrapped program, and uninstalled only after the wrapped program exits.
This strict ordering requirement ensures that all layers of wrappers
are called in the expected order, and that no calls are issued through
a no-longer-valid function pointer.

Unfortunately, the UEFI shim does not respect this strict ordering
requirement, and will instead uninstall (and reinstall) its wrappers
midway through the execution of the wrapped program.  This leaves the
wrapped program with an inconsistent view of the boot services table,
leading to incorrect behaviour.

This results in a boot failure when a first shim is used to boot iPXE,
which then uses a second shim to boot a Linux kernel:

  - First shim installs StartImage() and ExitBootServices() wrappers

  - First shim invokes iPXE via its own PE loader

  - iPXE installs ExitBootServices() wrapper

  - iPXE invokes second shim via StartImage()

At this point, the first shim's StartImage() wrapper will illegally
uninstall its ExitBootServices() wrapper, without first checking that
nothing else has modified the ExitBootServices function pointer.  This
effectively bypasses iPXE's own ExitBootServices() wrapper, which
causes a boot failure since the code within that wrapper does not get
called.

A proper fix would be for shim to install its wrappers before starting
the image and uninstall its wrappers only after the started image has
exited.  Instead of repeatedly uninstalling and reinstalling its
wrappers while the wrapped program is running, shim should simply use
a flag to keep track of whether or not it needs to modify the
behaviour of the wrapped calls.

Experience shows that there is unfortunately no point in trying to get
a fix for this upstreamed into shim.  We therefore work around the
shim bug by removing our ExitBootServices() wrapper and moving the
relevant code into our GetMemoryMap() wrapper.

Signed-off-by: Michael Brown <mcb30@ipxe.org>
 		2024-02-27 14:38:41 +00:00
.github/workflows [ci] Work around Ubuntu packaging metadata issues 2023-05-15 14:56:28 +01:00
contrib [cloud] Add utility script to read iPXE output from INT13CON partition 2023-11-07 18:05:45 +00:00
src [efi] Work around broken boot services table manipulation by UEFI shim 2024-02-27 14:38:41 +00:00
COPYING [legal] Update GPLv2 licence text 2015-02-26 17:59:53 +00:00
COPYING.GPLv2 [legal] Update GPLv2 licence text 2015-02-26 17:59:53 +00:00
COPYING.UBDL [legal] Add support for the Unmodified Binary Distribution Licence 2015-03-02 12:07:14 +00:00
README [doc] Re-add README file 2010-05-28 00:03:47 +01:00

README 

iPXE README File

Quick start guide:

   cd src
   make

For any more detailed instructions, see http://ipxe.org