Re: Grub get and set efi variables

From: Andrei Borzenkov <arvidjaar@gmail.com>
To: The development of GNU GRUB <grub-devel@gnu.org>
Subject: Re: Grub get and set efi variables
Date: Wed, 4 Nov 2015 08:38:01 +0300	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <563999B9.7020108@gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAA0a8nUtS1TQBPpY2qaRfz3KmrwSFWZJDCWBCu9rAXn424E4oQ@mail.gmail.com>

04.11.2015 02:05, Mat Troi пишет:
> Hi SevenBits,
>
> Thanks for letting me know.  Out of curiosity, any particular reason why
> this patch did not get merged?  It looks to be a useful feature.
>

First, this patch was reverse patch :)

I am not convinced making it easy to set EFI variable from within GRUB 
is good thing, because there are known reports about systems rendered 
unbootable by writing too much into EFI flash. What is your use case 
that absolutely requires setting EFI variables? How are you going to 
implement it on other platforms?

Reading does not harm and may be useful, but then it should provide 
generic interface to access arbitrary vendor namespace, not only EFI 
global variables, and handle arbitrary binary data, even if initial 
implementation handles only subset of them. Once someone starts to use 
it changing it will be much more difficult.

May be it should take hints how to interpret variable values, or have 
format option akin to printf.

> Thanks,
> Mat
>
> On Tue, Nov 3, 2015 at 12:12 PM, SevenBits <sevenbitstech@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Tuesday, November 3, 2015, Mat Troi <mattroisang@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> Searching through google, I see there was an email thread to add a patch
>>> for getting and setting efi variable in GRUB2.
>>> https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/grub-devel/2013-11/msg00328.html
>>>
>>> However, looking at the tree, it doesn't look like this patch was added,
>>> am I missing something?  Does anyone know if we have command to get/set efi
>>> variables in GRUB2?
>>>
>>>
>>> http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=grub.git;a=tree;f=grub-core/commands/efi;h=005fd2efc9a2eede2a1eb1cab8081c360219107b;hb=HEAD
>>>
>>>
>> I'm the author of that patch. No, it was never merged into the tree. As
>> far as I know, there is no equivalent functionality; GRUB does not support
>> this feature.
>>
>>
>>> Thanks,
>>> Mat
>>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Grub-devel mailing list
>> Grub-devel@gnu.org
>> https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/grub-devel
>>
>>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Grub-devel mailing list
> Grub-devel@gnu.org
> https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/grub-devel
>