linux-kernel - Re: Testing RAM from userspace / question about memmap= arguments

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] [day] [month] [year] [list]

Date:	Wed, 26 Dec 2007 22:37:52 +0200
From:	Maxim Levitsky <maximlevitsky@...il.com>
To:	Arjan van de Ven <arjan@...radead.org>
Cc:	Pavel Machek <pavel@....cz>,
	Matthew Bloch <matthew@...emark.co.uk>,
	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: Testing RAM from userspace / question about memmap= arguments

В сообщении от Wednesday 26 December 2007 12:17:56 Arjan van de Ven написал(а):
> On Wed, 26 Dec 2007 00:09:57 +0100
> Pavel Machek <pavel@....cz> wrote:
> 
> > On Sat 2007-12-22 12:09:59, Arjan van de Ven wrote:
> > > On Tue, 18 Dec 2007 17:06:24 +0000
> 
> > > memtest86+ does various magic to basically bypass the caches (by
> > > disabling them ;-)... Doing that in a live kernel situation, and
> > > from userspace to boot...... that's... and issue.
> > 
> > Are you sure? I always assumed that memtest just used patterns bigger
> > than L1/L2 caches...
> 
> that's... not nearly usable or enough. Caches are relatively smart
> about things like use-once.... and they're huge. 12Mb today. You'd need
> patterns bigger than 100Mb to get even close to being reasonably
> confident that there's nothing left.
> 
> > ... and IIRC my celeron testing confirmed it, if
> > I disabled L2 cache in BIOS, memtest behave differently.
> > 
> > Anyway, if you can do iopl(), we may as well let you disable caches,
> > but you are right, that will need a kernel patch.
> 
> and a new syscall of some sorts I suspect; "flush all caches" is a ring
> 0 operation (and you probably need to do it in an ipi anyway on all
> cpus)
> 

I think that PAT support will help a lot.
How about opening/mmaping /dev/mem, and setting uncacheable attribute there.
Actually it is even possible today with MTRRs.

Regards,
	Maxim Levitsky
--
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/