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: <473DD74F.60800@zytor.com>
Date:	Fri, 16 Nov 2007 09:45:51 -0800
From:	"H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@...or.com>
To:	Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@...p.org>
CC:	Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>,
	William Lee Irwin III <wli@...omorphy.com>,
	Andi Kleen <ak@...e.de>, Ingo Molnar <mingo@...e.hu>,
	Thomas Gleixner <tglx@...utronix.de>,
	Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@...oo.com.au>,
	Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: Why preallocate pmd in x86 32-bit PAE?

Jeremy Fitzhardinge wrote:
> 
> Hm, do you recall what processors that might affect?  As far as I know,
> current processors will ignore non-present top-level entries.  Anyway,
> we can point them not present to empty_zero_page, so testing the present
> bit will still be sufficient to tell if we need to allocate a new pmd,
> but if the hardware decides to follow the page reference there's no harm
> done.  (Hm, unless the hardware decides it wants to set A or D bits in
> empty_zero_page for some reason...)
> 

PDPTR is documented to have P bits but none of the other control bits, 
unlike other levels of the hierarchy.

The hardware never sets A or D bits on non-present pages, since all the 
bits except P are reserved for the operating systems (and, besides, they 
can never be accessed or dirty.)

>> What earlier CPU's did was to basically load all four values into the CPU 
>> when you loaded %cr3. There was no "three-level page table walker" at all: 
>> it was still a two-level page table walker, there were just for magic 
>> internal page tables that were indexed off the two high bits.
> 
> That just means we need to reload cr3 after populating the pgd with a
> new pmd, right?

Yes.  And as Linus said, it would be a new special case.

	-hpa

-
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

Powered by Openwall GNU/*/Linux Powered by OpenVZ