Linux Installation Guide on platforms which have patched vulnerability "CVE-2019-6260"

Introduction (CVE-2019-6260, nickname pantsdown)

The ASPEED ast2400 and ast2500 Baseband Management Controller (BMC) hardware and firmware implement Advanced High-performance Bus (AHB) bridges, which allow arbitrary read and write access to the BMC's physical address space from the host (or from the network in unusual cases where the BMC console uart is attached to a serial concentrator). This CVE applies to the specific cases of iLPC2AHB bridge Pt I, iLPC2AHB bridge Pt II, PCIe VGA P2A bridge, DMA from/to arbitrary BMC memory via X-DMA, UART-based SoC Debug interface, LPC2AHB bridge, PCIe BMC P2A bridge, and Watchdog setup.

The problem may be seen: 

The system with patched FW will show a black screen or soft lockup problem during Linux installation.

Installation Procedures:

1.  Download the driver (>=1.10 version) from the Aspeed website
2.  Launce the OS image and select "Troubleshooting" for Centos/RHEL 7.x version.
3.  Select "Install CentOS Linux 7 in basic graphics mode" to install
4. Boot into OS then copy and decompress the AST driver package.
5. Run the following commands to patch the driver.  

   • # cd /v11003_linux/LinuxDRM
     # tar zxvf lxdrm.tar.gz
     # ./auto-update.sh

   • 
   • Note: If there is any specific kernel version, please perform SRPM with corresponding kernel version mapping to the driver source. 
6. Run the following commands to check if the driver has been fully installed.

   • # rpm -qa |grep "ast"
     yum-plugin-fastestmirror-1.1.31-34.el7.noarch
     ast-drm-3.10.0-327.el7.x86_64-1.10-3.x86_64

7.  Edit the grub to remove "nomodeset"  from GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT line once you finish the driver installation.

   • # vim /etc/default/grub

8.  Regenerate the file

   • # grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg --> for Legacy

   • # grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/efi/EFI/(Distros_Name)/grub.cfg --> for UEFI

9. Reboot the System and you can see the driver as below via #lsmod command. 

Note: Basically support Centos / RHEL / Fedora / OpenSUSE, please refer to the "ReadMe.txt" for more details.