[3.19.y-ckt stable] Patch "efi: Add pstore variables to the deletion whitelist" has been added to the 3.19.y-ckt tree

[Kamal Mostafa]

This is a note to let you know that I have just added a patch titled

    efi: Add pstore variables to the deletion whitelist

to the linux-3.19.y-queue branch of the 3.19.y-ckt extended stable tree 
which can be found at:

    http://kernel.ubuntu.com/git/ubuntu/linux.git/log/?h=linux-3.19.y-queue

This patch is scheduled to be released in version 3.19.8-ckt19.

If you, or anyone else, feels it should not be added to this tree, please 
reply to this email.

For more information about the 3.19.y-ckt tree, see
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/Dev/ExtendedStable

Thanks.
-Kamal

---8<------------------------------------------------------------

>From a449e17bbc85e7eeeb2c5bbc0133a83dad01ee61 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Matt Fleming <matt at codeblueprint.co.uk>
Date: Mon, 15 Feb 2016 10:34:05 +0000
Subject: efi: Add pstore variables to the deletion whitelist

commit e246eb568bc4cbbdd8a30a3c11151ff9b7ca7312 upstream.

Laszlo explains why this is a good idea,

 'This is because the pstore filesystem can be backed by UEFI variables,
  and (for example) a crash might dump the last kilobytes of the dmesg
  into a number of pstore entries, each entry backed by a separate UEFI
  variable in the above GUID namespace, and with a variable name
  according to the above pattern.

  Please see "drivers/firmware/efi/efi-pstore.c".

  While this patch series will not prevent the user from deleting those
  UEFI variables via the pstore filesystem (i.e., deleting a pstore fs
  entry will continue to delete the backing UEFI variable), I think it
  would be nice to preserve the possibility for the sysadmin to delete
  Linux-created UEFI variables that carry portions of the crash log,
  *without* having to mount the pstore filesystem.'

There's also no chance of causing machines to become bricked by
deleting these variables, which is the whole purpose of excluding
things from the whitelist.

Use the LINUX_EFI_CRASH_GUID guid and a wildcard '*' for the match so
that we don't have to update the string in the future if new variable
name formats are created for crash dump variables.

Reported-by: Laszlo Ersek <lersek at redhat.com>
Acked-by: Peter Jones <pjones at redhat.com>
Tested-by: Peter Jones <pjones at redhat.com>
Cc: Matthew Garrett <mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org>
Cc: "Lee, Chun-Yi" <jlee at suse.com>
Signed-off-by: Matt Fleming <matt at codeblueprint.co.uk>
Signed-off-by: Luis Henriques <luis.henriques at canonical.com>
Signed-off-by: Kamal Mostafa <kamal at canonical.com>
---
 drivers/firmware/efi/vars.c | 1 +
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+)

diff --git a/drivers/firmware/efi/vars.c b/drivers/firmware/efi/vars.c
index 50f10ba..7f2ea21 100644
--- a/drivers/firmware/efi/vars.c
+++ b/drivers/firmware/efi/vars.c
@@ -198,6 +198,7 @@ static const struct variable_validate variable_validate[] = {
 	{ EFI_GLOBAL_VARIABLE_GUID, "OsIndications", NULL },
 	{ EFI_GLOBAL_VARIABLE_GUID, "PlatformLang", validate_ascii_string },
 	{ EFI_GLOBAL_VARIABLE_GUID, "Timeout", validate_uint16 },
+	{ LINUX_EFI_CRASH_GUID, "*", NULL },
 	{ NULL_GUID, "", NULL },
 };

--
2.7.4