efi: be more paranoid about available space when creating variables

Hi Matthew,

A bug was opened that reports a regression that prevents a system from booting[0]. After a kernel bisect, it was found that reverting the following commit resolved this bug:

commit 68d929862e29a8b52a7f2f2f86a0600423b093cd

Author: Matthew Garrett <matthew.garrett-05XSO3Yj/[email protected]>
Date:   Sat Mar 2 19:40:17 2013 -0500

efi: be more paranoid about available space when creating variables

The regression was introduced as of v3.9-rc2, but it also made it's way into the stable trees(Commit 9f677cf in v3.8).

I see the following commit was introduced to address this issue:

commit 31ff2f20d9003e74991d135f56e503fe776c127c

Author: Matthew Garrett <matthew.garrett-05XSO3Yj/[email protected]>
Date:   Mon Apr 15 13:09:47 2013 -0700

efi: Distinguish between "remaining space" and actually used space

However, the issue still in 3.9.4, 3.10-rc3 and v3.8.13 after backporting 31ff2f2.

I see that you are the author of this patch, so I wanted to run this by you and see if reverting commit 68d9298 is an option. There are several folks reporting this, so it should be easy to collect any additional data/information or perform testing, if needed.

Thanks,

Joe

[0] http://pad.lv/1173423

This should be fixed by f8b8404337de4e2466e2e1139ea68b1f8295974f

Matthew Garrett | [email protected]