On 03/22/2018 11:24 AM, Andreas Reichel wrote:
Hi,

I would like to discuss the following idea:

Assume a system, where efibootguard (ebg) is installed. The system
contains two config partitions and ebg expects exactly two.

Now assume, the user did something wrong and destroyed both root file
systems then efibootguard will boot the kernel, which then panics and
the user has no access anymore.

I would only be necessary if the currently loaded root file system gets corrupted after it was acknowledged by bg_setenv -c.


If however, the user generates an alternative boot medium with ebg as
well, the config partitions on the device are also detected and ebg from
the alternative boot medium detects more than two environments and
refuses to boot as well.

This is expected behavior due to security reasons: If internal ebg would
boot and a user would add a stick with a contaminated environment, then
the internal ebg could boot this environment if the number of
environments would not be fixed to the expected one.

The only solution at the moment is to use a boot medium with an
alternative boot loader.

A nicer idea however could be to add a new configure option to
configure efibootguard with a fixed internal environment. This way, it
might be easier for a user to generate a recovery stick.

Like ./configure --with-failsafe-env

Kernel could then just be sought on the efibootguard partition.

Opinions?

IMO it would be nice to have some sort of recovery mechansims that allows the maintenance technican to just plug an usb stick into the device and then the newest firmware is deployed to a possible broken system.

As Andreas stated, this usb stick would currently need to use a different bootloader and this makes the project setup more difficult. It would be nice IMO if efibootguard would also support this somehow as well.

Cheers,
Claudius

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