summaryrefslogtreecommitdiffstats
path: root/Documentation/filesystems/efivarfs.rst
diff options
context:
space:
mode:
Diffstat (limited to '')
-rw-r--r--Documentation/filesystems/efivarfs.rst43
1 files changed, 43 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/filesystems/efivarfs.rst b/Documentation/filesystems/efivarfs.rst
new file mode 100644
index 000000000..055198582
--- /dev/null
+++ b/Documentation/filesystems/efivarfs.rst
@@ -0,0 +1,43 @@
+.. SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0
+
+=======================================
+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.
+
+.. warning ::
+ When a content of an UEFI variable in /sys/firmware/efi/efivars is
+ displayed, for example using "hexdump", pay attention that the first
+ 4 bytes of the output represent the UEFI variable attributes,
+ in little-endian format.
+
+ Practically the output of each efivar is composed of:
+
+ +-----------------------------------+
+ |4_bytes_of_attributes + efivar_data|
+ +-----------------------------------+
+
+*See also:*
+
+- Documentation/admin-guide/acpi/ssdt-overlays.rst
+- Documentation/ABI/stable/sysfs-firmware-efi-vars