Once we move to a more proper shutdown procedure, processes other than
the finalizer task must be able to perform cleanup and finalization
duties, not only because the finalizer task itself needs to be cleaned
up by someone. This global variable, mirroring the early boot flags,
allows a future shutdown process to perform cleanup on its own.
Note that while this *could* be considered a weakening in security, the
attack surface is minimal and the results are not dramatic. To exploit
this, an attacker would have to gain a Kernel write primitive to this
global variable (bypassing KASLR among other things) and then gain some
way of calling the relevant functions, all of this only to destroy some
other running process. The same effect can be achieved with LPE which
can often be gained with significantly simpler userspace exploits (e.g.
of setuid binaries).
2fd23745a9