| 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
| ||
|
Date: Wed, 25 Aug 2010 16:54:16 -0700 From: "H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@...or.com> To: LKML <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org> CC: Ingo Molnar <mingo@...e.hu>, Thomas Gleixner <tglx@...utronix.de>, Arjan van de Ven <arjan@...radead.org>, Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@...p.org>, Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org> Subject: RFC: remove or modify check_for_bios_corruption() check_for_bios_corruption() was added to discover how many systems have BIOSes with problems corrupting low memory. The answer really is very simple... almost all. In fact, I have seen claims that Windows 7 doesn't use any memory below the 1 MiB point at all for this reason. As such, I have queued up a patch in -tip to reserve the low 64K for all BIOSes, with an option (suggested by Andrew) to adjust the reservation further. Since checking for corruption makes the memory unavailable anyway and since it is now established the memory is too unreliable to use, I am suggesting removing the check code completely. The other alternative is to have it optionally scan from the reserved threshold to some higher point, and only kick in if that gap is nonzero. That way it doesn't continually run for most users, but it might be useful to confirm corruption if we explicitly suspect it on some system. Thoughts? -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