Commit

  3ee372cc ("x86/boot/compressed/64: Remove .bss/.pgtable from bzImage")

removed the .bss section from the bzImage.

However, while a PE loader is required to zero-initialize the .bss
section before calling the PE entry point, the EFI handover protocol
does not currently document any requirement that .bss be initialized by
the bootloader prior to calling the handover entry.

When systemd-boot is used to boot a unified kernel image [1], the image
is constructed by embedding the bzImage as a .linux section in a PE
executable that contains a small stub loader from systemd together with
additional sections and potentially an initrd. As the .bss section
within the bzImage is no longer explicitly present as part of the file,
it is not initialized before calling the EFI handover entry.
Furthermore, as the size of the embedded .linux section is only the size
of the bzImage file itself, the .bss section's memory may not even have
been allocated.

In particular, this can result in efi_disable_pci_dma being true even
when it was not specified via the command line or configuration option,
which in turn causes crashes while booting on some systems.

To avoid issues, place all EFI stub global variables into the .data
section instead of .bss. As of this writing, only boolean flags for a
few command line arguments and the sys_table pointer were in .bss and
will now move into the .data section.

[1] https://systemd.io/BOOT_LOADER_SPECIFICATION/#type-2-efi-unified-kernel-images

Fixes: 3ee372cc ("x86/boot/compressed/64: Remove .bss/.pgtable from bzImage")
Reported-by: Sergey Shatunov <me@prok.pw>
Signed-off-by: Arvind Sankar <nivedita@alum.mit.edu>
Signed-off-by: Ard Biesheuvel <ardb@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20200406180614.429454-1-nivedita@alum.mit.edu
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20200409130434.6736-4-ardb@kernel.org