The EFI handover protocol permits a bootloader to invoke the kernel as a
EFI PE/COFF application, while passing a bootparams struct as a third
argument to the entrypoint function call.
This has no basis in the UEFI specification, and there are better ways
to pass additional data to a UEFI application (UEFI configuration
tables, UEFI variables, UEFI protocols) than going around the
StartImage() boot service and jumping to a fixed offset in the loaded
image, just to call a different function that takes a third parameter.
The reason for handling struct bootparams in the bootloader was that the
EFI stub could only load initrd images from the EFI system partition,
and so passing it via struct bootparams was needed for loaders like
GRUB, which pass the initrd in memory, and may load it from anywhere,
including from the network. Another motivation was EFI mixed mode, which
could not use the initrd loader in the EFI stub at all due to 32/64 bit
incompatibilities (which will be fixed shortly [0]), and could not
invoke the ordinary PE/COFF entry point either, for the same reasons.
Given that loaders such as GRUB already carried the bootparams handling
in order to implement non-EFI boot, retaining that code and just passing
bootparams to the EFI stub was a reasonable choice (although defining an
alternate entrypoint could have been avoided.) However, the GRUB side
changes never made it upstream, and are only shipped by some of the
distros in their downstream versions.
In the meantime, EFI support has been added to other Linux architecture
ports, as well as to U-boot and systemd, including arch-agnostic methods
for passing initrd images in memory [1], and for doing mixed mode boot
[2], none of them requiring anything like the EFI handover protocol. So
given that only out-of-tree distro GRUB relies on this, let's permit it
to be omitted from the build, in preparation for retiring it completely
at a later date. (Note that systemd-boot does have an implementation as
well, but only uses it as a fallback for booting images that do not
implement the LoadFile2 based initrd loading method, i.e., v5.8 or older)
[0] https://lore.kernel.org/all/20220927085842.2860715-1-ardb@kernel.org/
[1] ec93fc371f ("efi/libstub: Add support for loading the initrd from a device path")
[2] 97aa276579 ("efi/x86: Add true mixed mode entry point into .compat section")
Signed-off-by: Ard Biesheuvel <ardb@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Borislav Petkov <bp@suse.de>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20221122161017.2426828-18-ardb@kernel.org
cc3fdda287