linux-kernel - Re: 2.6.23 boot failures on x86-64.

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]

Message-Id: <200710292003.09317.ak@suse.de>
Date:	Mon, 29 Oct 2007 20:03:09 +0100
From:	Andi Kleen <ak@...e.de>
To:	Dave Jones <davej@...hat.com>
Cc:	Linux Kernel <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
	Martin Ebourne <fedora@...urne.me.uk>,
	Zou Nan hai <nanhai.zou@...el.com>,
	Suresh Siddha <suresh.b.siddha@...el.com>, stable@...nel.org,
	Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
	Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>
Subject: Re: 2.6.23 boot failures on x86-64.

On Monday 29 October 2007 19:47:47 Dave Jones wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 29, 2007 at 07:18:43PM +0100, Andi Kleen wrote:
>  > On Monday 29 October 2007 18:50:14 Dave Jones wrote:
>  > > We've had a number of people reporting that their x86-64s stopped booting
>  > > when they moved to 2.6.23.  It rebooted just after discovering the AGP bridge
>  > > as a result of the IOMMU init.
>  > 
>  > It's probably the usual "nobody tests sparsemem at all" issue.
> 
> We've been using SPARSEMEM in Fedora for a *long* time.
> So long in fact, I forget why we moved away from DISCONTIGMEM, so there's
> a significant number of users using that configuration for some time.

Supposedly you wanted a slower kernel that needs more memory? 

Ok I wasn't aware of that. I tended to get sparsemem reports usually
at least 1-2 releases after the fact, so it looked like it was undertested.

> 
>  > But if allocating bootmem >4G doesn't work on these systems
>  > most likely they have more problems anyways. It might be better
>  > to find out what goes wrong exactly.
> 
> Any ideas on what to instrument ?

See what address the bootmem_alloc_high returns; check if it overlaps
with something etc.

Fill the memory on the system and see if it can access all of its memory.

-Andi
-
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/