I have pushed an updated flash topic branch that fixes the persistent storage on RTSM and QEMU. The ARM NOR support in UEFI only supports Firmware volumes that start at the beginning of a NOR flash region, so I have moved the variable storage to be at the base of the secondary flash. This seems like an odd restriction, and I'm unsure if this was an intentional design decision of just a simplification to get NOR working.
Topic branch:
https://git.linaro.org/people/roy.franz/uefi-next.git/shortlog/refs/heads/to...
I will need to send out updated patches to the list based on these changes as well.
Roy