The Next Linux Kernel Will Further Fend Off Buggy EFI Firmware

The EFI support code within the mainline Linux kernel continues to be improved upon. While EFI firmware has matured in the past few years to become more reliable, there still are systems/motherboards shipping with various bugs. One of the additions for this next kernel release will better handle rare cases where buggy firmware could hang the kernel.

Intel Linux developer Sai Praneeth added page fault handling to the x86 EFI kernel code for EFI run-time services. With this EFI page fault handler, this can prevent potential system hangs that occur because of the buggy firmware. The code also reports when the system encounters illegal accesses to the EFI regions so the user is aware it's a firmware problem as opposed to a kernel bug.

Besides this EFI page fault handling code, there is also now support in conjunction with the EFI firmware to create memory reservations that can span across kexec along with other fixes and updates. Details within this already merged pull request.