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authorMichael Brown2024-03-29 14:03:38 +0100
committerMichael Brown2024-04-03 01:03:49 +0200
commit165995b7e917a94533799fe43d14f5e3b1fef285 (patch)
tree5cab20918fc7471b8b911ed9dbf8b520970249ca /src/include/ipxe/settings.h
parent[cachedhcp] Allow cached DHCPACK to apply to temporary network devices (diff)
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[efi] Restructure handling of autoexec.ipxe script
We currently attempt to obtain the autoexec.ipxe script via early use of the EFI_SIMPLE_FILE_SYSTEM_PROTOCOL or EFI_PXE_BASE_CODE_PROTOCOL interfaces to obtain an opaque block of memory, which is then registered as an image at an appropriate point during our startup sequence. The early use of these existent interfaces allows us to obtain the script even if our subsequent actions (e.g. disconnecting drivers in order to connect up our own) may cause the script to become inaccessible. This mirrors the approach used under BIOS, where the autoexec.ipxe script is provided by the prefix (e.g. as an initrd image when using the .lkrn build of iPXE) and so must be copied into a normally allocated image from wherever it happens to previously exist in memory. We do not currently have support for downloading an autoexec.ipxe script if we were ourselves downloaded via UEFI HTTP boot. There is an EFI_HTTP_PROTOCOL defined within the UEFI specification, but it is so poorly designed as to be unusable for the simple purpose of downloading an additional file from the same directory. It provides almost nothing more than a very slim wrapper around EFI_TCP4_PROTOCOL (or EFI_TCP6_PROTOCOL). It will not handle redirection, content encoding, retries, or even fundamentals such as the Content-Length header, leaving all of this up to the caller. The UEFI HTTP Boot driver will install an EFI_LOAD_FILE_PROTOCOL instance on the loaded image's device handle. This looks promising at first since it provides the LoadFile() API call which is specified to accept an arbitrary filename parameter. However, experimentation (and inspection of the code in EDK2) reveals a multitude of problems that prevent this from being usable. Calling LoadFile() will idiotically restart the entire DHCP process (and potentially pop up a UI requiring input from the user for e.g. a wireless network password). The filename provided to LoadFile() will be ignored. Any downloaded file will be rejected unless it happens to match one of the limited set of types expected by the UEFI HTTP Boot driver. The list of design failures and conceptual mismatches is fairly impressive. Choose to bypass every possible aspect of UEFI HTTP support, and instead use our own HTTP client and network stack to download the autoexec.ipxe script over a temporary MNP network device. Since this approach works for TFTP as well as HTTP, drop the direct use of EFI_PXE_BASE_CODE_PROTOCOL. For consistency and simplicity, also drop the direct use of EFI_SIMPLE_FILE_SYSTEM_PROTOCOL and rely upon our existing support to access local files via "file:" URIs. This approach results in console output during the "iPXE initialising devices...ok" message that appears while startup is in progress. Remove the trailing "ok" so that this intermediate output appears at a sensible location on the screen. The welcome banner that will be printed immediately afterwards provides an indication that startup has completed successfully even absent the explicit "ok". Signed-off-by: Michael Brown <mcb30@ipxe.org>
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