summaryrefslogtreecommitdiffstats
path: root/Documentation/filesystems/efivarfs.txt
diff options
context:
space:
mode:
Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation/filesystems/efivarfs.txt')
-rw-r--r--Documentation/filesystems/efivarfs.txt23
1 files changed, 23 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/filesystems/efivarfs.txt b/Documentation/filesystems/efivarfs.txt
new file mode 100644
index 000000000..686a64bba
--- /dev/null
+++ b/Documentation/filesystems/efivarfs.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,23 @@
+
+efivarfs - a (U)EFI variable filesystem
+
+The efivarfs filesystem was created to address the shortcomings of
+using entries in sysfs to maintain EFI variables. The old sysfs EFI
+variables code only supported variables of up to 1024 bytes. This
+limitation existed in version 0.99 of the EFI specification, but was
+removed before any full releases. Since variables can now be larger
+than a single page, sysfs isn't the best interface for this.
+
+Variables can be created, deleted and modified with the efivarfs
+filesystem.
+
+efivarfs is typically mounted like this,
+
+ mount -t efivarfs none /sys/firmware/efi/efivars
+
+Due to the presence of numerous firmware bugs where removing non-standard
+UEFI variables causes the system firmware to fail to POST, efivarfs
+files that are not well-known standardized variables are created
+as immutable files. This doesn't prevent removal - "chattr -i" will work -
+but it does prevent this kind of failure from being accomplished
+accidentally.