Gentoo Archives: gentoo-dev

From: Andrew Savchenko <bircoph@g.o>
To: gentoo-dev@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-dev] newsitem: openrc-0.28 mounts efivars read only
Date: Thu, 13 Jul 2017 11:43:20
Message-Id: 20170713144308.3e0dd3139d5be936e28c3e7d@gentoo.org
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-dev] newsitem: openrc-0.28 mounts efivars read only by Rich Freeman
1 On Thu, 13 Jul 2017 07:09:45 -0400 Rich Freeman wrote:
2 > On Thu, Jul 13, 2017 at 2:30 AM, Andrew Savchenko <bircoph@g.o> wrote:
3 > > On Wed, 12 Jul 2017 17:42:50 -0700 Matt Turner wrote:
4 > >> On Wed, Jul 12, 2017 at 5:29 PM, Lucas Ramage <ramage.lucas94@×××××.com> wrote:
5 > >> > What needs to be changed for the bootloaders? I may be able to assist.
6 > >>
7 > >> The documentation should be updated to say that with OpenRC 0.28 that
8 > >> you'll have to remount efivars as RW before you can install the
9 > >> bootloader (e.g., grub-install)
10 > >>
11 > >> The command I use locally to remount rw (since I have configured
12 > >> efivars to be mounted read-only in fstab) is
13 > >>
14 > >> mount -o remount,rw /sys/firmware/efi/efivars
15 > >
16 > > We don't have that much efi bootloaders. Maybe it will be better
17 > > to update their scripting to remount efivars rw and back ro when
18 > > needed? The same way we have non-efi bootloaders to mount /boot
19 > > partition when needed.
20 > >
21 >
22 > Presumably you'd only want to remount it if it was mounted ro to
23 > start, since it sounds like openrc will be diverging from systemd
24 > behavior here.
25 >
26 > While it seems like a good idea I'm not sure how big an improvement it
27 > is in the larger scheme. We're worried about root accidentially
28 > modifying efivars, but we have no safeguards against root writing to
29 > /dev/sda, and the latter seems much more likely to cause harm, and is
30 > harder to fix.
31
32 Writing to /dev/sda may kill data stored there, but hardware itself
33 will survive. Writing to efivars kills hardware and this is the
34 motivation for this change. See [1] and [2] for details. Poettering
35 says this is OK to hard brick device, well fine, this is systemd
36 way. OpenRC is smarter here and protects users from unintended
37 disaster.
38
39 Data can be restored from backup, but hard bricked hardware may
40 become completely dead beyond repair or require a very complicated
41 soldering. So I see this issue much more serious than writing
42 to /dev/sda.
43
44 [1] https://github.com/openrc/openrc/issues/134
45 [2] https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/2402
46
47 Best regards,
48 Andrew Savchenko

Replies

Subject Author
Re: [gentoo-dev] newsitem: openrc-0.28 mounts efivars read only Rich Freeman <rich0@g.o>