Very interesting. I wonder if this a result of some "swiss cheese" effect due to constraints around UEFI and NVRAM themselves, when updating EFI variables.
NVRAM must maintain atomicity of memory transactions for power failures. Its whole purpose is to store data when you turn your computer off. As a result, when deleteing an EFI variable, you can't manage the individual bytes - you have to delete a whole entry (which can be rather large - based on the EFI specification and the code used for edk2, e.g. https://github.com/tianocore/edk2/blob/83a86f465ccb1a792f5c5...). Deleting these entries might become a problem when you start running against memory constraints and what slots in memory are actually available; hence a possible fragmentation issue.
Additionally, I appreciated how short and specific this blog post was. I enjoy this style of post of someone encountering a problem and solving it.
NVRAM must maintain atomicity of memory transactions for power failures. Its whole purpose is to store data when you turn your computer off. As a result, when deleteing an EFI variable, you can't manage the individual bytes - you have to delete a whole entry (which can be rather large - based on the EFI specification and the code used for edk2, e.g. https://github.com/tianocore/edk2/blob/83a86f465ccb1a792f5c5...). Deleting these entries might become a problem when you start running against memory constraints and what slots in memory are actually available; hence a possible fragmentation issue.
Additionally, I appreciated how short and specific this blog post was. I enjoy this style of post of someone encountering a problem and solving it.