lists.openwall.net   lists  /  announce  owl-users  owl-dev  john-users  john-dev  passwdqc-users  yescrypt  popa3d-users  /  oss-security  kernel-hardening  musl  sabotage  tlsify  passwords  /  crypt-dev  xvendor  /  Bugtraq  Full-Disclosure  linux-kernel  linux-netdev  linux-ext4  linux-hardening  linux-cve-announce  PHC 
Open Source and information security mailing list archives
 
Hash Suite: Windows password security audit tool. GUI, reports in PDF.
[<prev] [next>] [<thread-prev] [thread-next>] [day] [month] [year] [list]
Date:	Wed, 13 Jun 2007 16:19:04 -0600
From:	ebiederm@...ssion.com (Eric W. Biederman)
To:	Jesse Barnes <jbarnes@...tuousgeek.org>
Cc:	Jesse Barnes <jesse.barnes@...el.com>,
	Andi Kleen <andi@...stfloor.org>, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
	Justin Piszcz <jpiszcz@...idpixels.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] trim memory not covered by WB MTRRs

Jesse Barnes <jbarnes@...tuousgeek.org> writes:

> On Tuesday, June 12, 2007 6:11:21 Eric W. Biederman wrote:
>> Jesse Barnes <jesse.barnes@...el.com> writes:
>> > On some machines, buggy BIOSes don't properly setup WB MTRRs to
>> > cover all available RAM, meaning the last few megs (or even gigs)
>> > of memory will be marked uncached.  Since Linux tends to allocate
>> > from high memory addresses first, this causes the machine to be
>> > unusably slow as soon as the kernel starts really using memory
>> > (i.e. right around init time).
>> >
>> > This patch works around the problem by scanning the MTRRs at
>> > boot and figuring out whether the current end_pfn value (setup
>> > by early e820 code) goes beyond the highest WB MTRR range, and
>> > if so, trimming it to match.  A fairly obnoxious KERN_WARNING
>> > is printed too, letting the user know that not all of their
>> > memory is available due to a likely BIOS bug.
>>
>> A quick update.  This patch is horribly incorrect on a socket F
>> opteron/Athlon 64 with memory above 4GB.
>>
>> In particular those cpus are capable of mapping all of memory
>> above 4GB as write back without using a single MTRR.
>>
>> So examining MTRRs is insufficient.
>
> Hm, yuck.  What do you suggest?  Should we only run this check when Intel 
> chips are present?  Checking only the bottom 4G isn't sufficient since we've 
> seen platforms that have issues above that range...

My gut feel says that we need to call a function that is potentially cpu specific,
older AMD cpus and Intel cpus can just use the generic mtrr code.

I would also suggest we build a list of ranges of write-back memory.  Which
until we handle overlapping MTRRs in the generic MTRR case is just the write-back
MTRRs.

Then we get the data in a linux specific form we can check the linux specific
data structure against the e820 map.

I don't think that is going to much harder and it allows for creative cpu
designers.

Although this suggests that we want to worry about all memory holes as
well.  Because I have seen at least one system which failed to cover
the lower 4G with MTRRs.  While everything above 4G was fine.

Eric

-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@...r.kernel.org
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/

Powered by blists - more mailing lists