linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH RFC] x86: check for and defend against BIOS memory corruption

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Message-ID: <20080829102547.655440bf@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>
Date:	Fri, 29 Aug 2008 10:25:47 +0100
From:	Alan Cox <alan@...rguk.ukuu.org.uk>
To:	Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@...p.org>
Cc:	Yinghai Lu <yhlu.kernel@...il.com>, Ingo Molnar <mingo@...e.hu>,
	Rafał Miłecki <zajec5@...il.com>,
	Alan Jenkins <alan-jenkins@...fmail.co.uk>,
	Hugh Dickens <hugh@...itas.com>,
	"H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@...or.com>,
	Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH RFC] x86: check for and defend against BIOS memory
 corruption

> >>  - Clears the reserved memory so we can observe changes to it.

You ought to pick different values on different runs 0x00, 0xFF, 0xAA,
0x55 etc...

> Yeah, OK, but I think it should default to ON for now.  The problem is
> that we had two very different systems (Sony Vaio and Intel desktop)

So a zillion people should lose a chunk of RAM because of what is
probably an obscure bug in a single version of a piece of SMM code on two
systems total ?

That appears to be totally out of proportion - plus the defaults are
*irrelevant* for mass user coverage. If you want large scale coverage ask
the Fedora, OpenSuSE and Ubuntu people to turn it on for a testing kernel
release and report back.

Alan
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