[tripflag]

There's also the fact that an NVRAM variable is never overwritten inplace; the new value is written elsewhere, and the pointer is updated to use the address of the new value. This is probably mainly for wear-leveling, but I guess it could also introduce fragmentation?

Just an observation from when I was debugging a board that selfdestructed when booting a particular efi-file so I had to dig into the flash contents to figure out why, but I think this particular code was straight from tianocore.

[MindSpunk]

Probably for atomicity. It’s likely only a pointer sized block can be updated atomically so in order to safely update the value that may be larger you write it somewhere else and atomically update the pointer. That way you can only observe the old or new value, and not some intermediate result if power was lost part way through writing the new value. The same techniques are used in journaling file systems.

[RealityVoid]

I'm curious how the NVRAM is actually stored. In embedded systems on microcontrollers the constraints of the HW make you do what we called "Emulated EEPROM". You are able to erase data in increments of, for example 4kb and write it in increments of 16 bytes (but it varies with implementation). So on write you just say... this is block foo and it stores value bar and you append it to the latest not written data in the block. When you recover data, you just look for the latest valid value of foo and say "the value of foo is bar". You might have multiple instances of foo written, but only the latest is the valid one. Once the active block is full, you swap out all the current values of all the NvM blocks to the next erasable HW block.

Yes, this achieves atomicity, yes this gets you wear leveling (with the caveat that the more data you store, the worse the lifetime gets because you need to do more swaps) but it also is a consequence of HW constraints and the approach flows directly from it. It might be the consequence of HW/SW co-design at some point in the past as well, but I have no idea whether this is true.

This information is based on my experience in automotive.

[pbrowne011]

True, I was trying to find the variable storage requirements in the UEFI specification but couldn't (is it Section 3? 8?), so I resorted to linking to the struct definition in the EFI shell package that the author used.