Re: [PATCH 2/4] efi/libstub: detect panel-id

[Rob Clark <robdclark@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Jul 2, 2019 at 1:35 PM Ard Biesheuvel <ard.biesheuvel@linaro.org> wrote:
>
> On Tue, 2 Jul 2019 at 22:26, Ard Biesheuvel <ard.biesheuvel@linaro.org> wrote:
> >
> > On Sun, 30 Jun 2019 at 22:36, Rob Clark <robdclark@gmail.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > From: Rob Clark <robdclark@chromium.org>
> > >
> > > On snapdragon aarch64 laptops, a 'UEFIDisplayInfo' variable is provided
> > > to communicate some information about the display.  Crutially it has the
> > > panel-id, so the appropriate panel driver can be selected.  Read this
> > > out and stash in /chosen/panel-id so that display driver can use it to
> > > pick the appropriate panel.
> > >
> > > Signed-off-by: Rob Clark <robdclark@chromium.org>
> >
> > Hi Rob,
> >
> > I understand why you are doing this, but this *really* belongs elsewhere.
> >
> > So we are dealing with a platform that violates the UEFI spec, since
> > it does not bother to implement variable services at runtime (because
> > MS let the vendor get away with this).
> >
>
> To clarify, the above remark applies to populating the DT from the OS
> rather than from the firmware.

yeah, it isn't pretty, but there *are* some other similar cases where
efi-stub is populating DT.. (like update_fdt_memmap() and
kaslr-seed)..

it would be kinda nice to have an early-quirks mechanism where this
could fit, but I thought that might be equally unpopular ;-)

>
> > First of all, to pass data between the EFI stub and the OS proper, we
> > should use a configuration table rather than a DT property, since the
> > former is ACPI/DT agnostic. Also, I'd like the consumer of the data to
> > actually interpret it, i.e., just dump the whole opaque thing into a
> > config table in the stub, and do the parsing in the OS proper.
> >
> > However, I am not thrilled at adding code to the stub that
> > unconditionally looks for some variable with some magic name on all
> > ARM/arm64 EFI systems, so this will need to live under a Kconfig
> > option that depends on ARM64 (and does not default to y)

I defn can add this under kconfig.. is it ok if that option is
select'd by ARCH_QCOM?

(Just trying to minimize the things that can go wrong and the "I get a
blank screen at boot" bug reports I get ;-))

> ... but saving variables at boot time for consumption at runtime is
> something that we will likely see more of in the future.

I think this will be nice, but it also doesn't address the need for a
quirk to get this into /chosen..  I guess we *could* use a shim or
something that runs before the kernel to do this.  But that just seems
like a logistical/support nightmare.  There is one kernel, and there
are N distro's, so debugging a users "I don't get a screen at boot"
problem because their distro missed some shim patch really just
doesn't seem like a headache I want to have.

BR,
-R