Re: [PATCH] xen: Create EFI_VENDOR directory

From: Michael Young <m.a.young@durham.ac.uk>
To: Ian Jackson <iwj@xenproject.org>
Cc: Jan Beulich <jbeulich@suse.com>,
	Jason Andryuk <jandryuk@gmail.com>,
	 Andrew Cooper <andrew.cooper3@citrix.com>,
	 George Dunlap <george.dunlap@citrix.com>,
	Julien Grall <julien@xen.org>,
	 Stefano Stabellini <sstabellini@kernel.org>,
	Wei Liu <wl@xen.org>,  xen-devel <xen-devel@lists.xenproject.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] xen: Create EFI_VENDOR directory
Date: Tue, 23 Mar 2021 15:58:54 +0000 (GMT)	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <f13cc06f-3f1f-12ae-fad2-adcdb3726e96@algedi.dur.ac.uk> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <24665.61470.964721.635678@mariner.uk.xensource.com>

On Tue, 23 Mar 2021, Ian Jackson wrote:

> Jan Beulich writes ("Re: [PATCH] xen: Create EFI_VENDOR directory"):
>> On 23.03.2021 13:34, Jason Andryuk wrote:
> ...
>>> On Fedora, RPMs drop EFI binaries directly into /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/.
>>> grub, shim, fwupdate and xen are all packaged that way.  It seems
>>> reasonable to have those important binaries tracked by the package
>>> manager.
>>>
>>> Does SuSE populate EFI_VENDOR from EFI_DIR when some boot loader
>>> script is called?
>>
>> Yes. And back at the time, when I consulted our EFI person, I was left
>> with the impression that this is the only reasonable approach. The
>> primary reason, as said, was that the EFI partition as a whole may get
>> rebuilt perhaps even from scratch at any point. Hence it's not
>> reasonable to expect package-managed files to live there.
>
> I agree with this analysis but it is for people like Fedora to decide
> how they want to build their packages.
>
> There is also the case of ad-hoc packages (eg our "make debball")
> which the user might reasonably choose to have dump things in the EFI
> system partition.
>
> Conversely, I see no downside to the mkdir.  Jan, is there some actual
> harm in it ?  If not, we should be accomodating to people's build and
> packaging strategies even if we don't entirely approve of them.

There is a request in https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1750733 
for xen on Fedora to install the efi file elsewhere and then copy it to 
/boot/efi post install. I could change the current Fedora set up for 
Fedora 35 (which should have xen-4.15) if there is a good reason to do so. 
I am not sure how useful the xen.efi file in /boot/efi is anyway for the 
the Fedora set up as it will generally use a xen*.gz file in /boot via 
grub.

 	Michael Young