From Nayna's cover letter:
The IMA subsystem supports custom, built-in, arch-specific policies
to define the files to be measured and appraised. These policies are
honored based on priority, where arch-specific policy is the highest
and custom is the lowest.
PowerNV systems use a Linux-based bootloader to kexec the OS. The
bootloader kernel relies on IMA for signature verification of the OS
kernel before doing the kexec. This patchset adds support for
powerpc arch-specific IMA policies that are conditionally defined
based on a system's secure boot and trusted boot states. The OS
secure boot and trusted boot states are determined via device-tree
properties.
The verification needs to be performed only for binaries that are
not blacklisted. The kernel currently only checks against the
blacklist of keys. However, doing so results in blacklisting all the
binaries that are signed by the same key. In order to prevent just
one particular binary from being loaded, it must be checked against
a blacklist of binary hashes. This patchset also adds support to IMA
for checking against a hash blacklist for files. signed by appended
signature.