Bug#616638: using the "linux" command twice in a row causes grub-efi-amd64 to hang

[Daniel Kahn Gillmor]

On 03/08/2011 05:26 AM, Colin Watson wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 06, 2011 at 02:37:42AM -0500, Daniel Kahn Gillmor wrote:
>> Booting grub-efi directly on a new macbook pro, i found that if i
>> accidentally did:
>>
>>  linux (hd1,gpt2)/vmlinuz root=/dev/sda3 ro verbose
>>  linux (hd1,gpt2)/vmlinuz root=/dev/sda3 ro verbose
>>
>> (that is, if i loaded the kernel twice) then grub would hang.
 [...]
> There's a fairly small number of differences between BIOS and EFI that
> might be relevant to the 'linux' command.  One of them is memory
> allocation, so I looked through that code path, and I noticed one bug by
> inspection that could certainly cause your problem.  Could you try this
> patch?

Gah.  i no longer have physical access to the EFI machine i ran across
this bug on, so i can't test your proposed patch in the near future.

Actually, i ended up (unhappily) reverting to grub-pc on that machine
using BIOS emulation under rEFIt because the linux kernel was too buggy
under EFI to even get a working keyboard.  (http://bugs.debian.org/617377)

And i suspect that the machine is now in active use by its owner, so my
opportunity to break the machine's ability to boot for the sake of
testing bootloaders might have passed altogether :(

If i can get my hands on another macbook that i *can* break, i'll be
sure to try out your patch.  Maybe (hopefully?) someone else with better
access to the hardware can beat me to it.

Thanks for the review.

	--dkg

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