We have been discussing the state of EFI memory management for some years so I thought it might be best to send a short series showing some of the issues we have talked about.
This one just deals with memory allocation. It provides a way to detect EFI 'page allocations' when U-Boot' malloc() should be used. It should help us to clean up this area of U-Boot.
It also updates EFI to use U-Boot memory allocation for the pool. Most functions use that anyway and it is much more efficient. It also avoids allocating things 'in space' in conflict with the loaded images.
This series also includes a little patch to show more information in the index for the EFI pages.
Note that this series is independent from Sugosh's lmb series[1], although I believe it will point the way to simplifying some of the later patches in that series.
Overall, some issues which should be resolved are: - allocation inconsistency, e.g. efi_add_protocol() uses malloc() but efi_dp_dup() does not (this series makes a start) - change efi_bl_init() to register events later, when the devices are actually used - rather than efi_set_bootdev(), provide a bootstd way to take note of the device images came from and allow EFI to query that when needed - EFI_LOADER_BOUNCE_BUFFER - can use U-Boot bounce buffers?
Minor questions on my mind: - is unaligned access useful? Is there a performance penalty? - API confusion about whether something is an address or a pointer
[1] https://patchwork.ozlabs.org/project/uboot/list/?series=416441
Simon Glass (6): doc: Show more information in efi index efi: Convert device_path allocation to use malloc() efi: Allow monitoring of page allocations efi: Avoid pool allocation in efi_get_memory_map_alloc() efi: Use malloc() for the EFI pool efi: Show the location of the bounce buffer
doc/develop/uefi/index.rst | 2 +- include/efi_loader.h | 24 ++++ lib/efi_loader/efi_bootbin.c | 10 ++ lib/efi_loader/efi_device_path.c | 43 ++++--- lib/efi_loader/efi_device_path_to_text.c | 2 +- lib/efi_loader/efi_memory.c | 148 +++++++++++------------ lib/efi_loader/efi_setup.c | 7 ++ 7 files changed, 133 insertions(+), 103 deletions(-)