linux-kernel - Re: KASLR causes intermittent boot failures on some systems

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Date:   Wed, 12 Apr 2017 16:24:33 +0800
From:   Dave Young <dyoung@...hat.com>
To:     Jeff Moyer <jmoyer@...hat.com>
Cc:     thgarnie@...gle.com, mingo@...nel.org, bhe@...hat.com,
        dan.j.williams@...el.com, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
        linux-nvdimm@...ts.01.org, kexec@...ts.infradead.org
Subject: Re: KASLR causes intermittent boot failures on some systems

On 04/07/17 at 10:41am, Jeff Moyer wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> commit 021182e52fe01 ("x86/mm: Enable KASLR for physical mapping memory
> regions") causes some of my systems with persistent memory (whether real
> or emulated) to fail to boot with a couple of different crash
> signatures.  The first signature is a NMI watchdog lockup of all but 1
> cpu, which causes much difficulty in extracting useful information from
> the console.  The second variant is an invalid paging request, listed
> below.
> 
> On some systems, I haven't hit this problem at all.  Other systems
> experience a failed boot maybe 20-30% of the time.  To reproduce it,
> configure some emulated pmem on your system.  You can find directions
> for that here: https://nvdimm.wiki.kernel.org/
> 
> Install ndctl (https://github.com/pmem/ndctl).
> Configure the namespace:
> # ndctl create-namespace -f -e namespace0.0 -m memory
> 
> Then just reboot several times (5 should be enough), and hopefully
> you'll hit the issue.
> 
> I've attached both my .config and the dmesg output from a successful
> boot at the end of this mail.
> 
[snip]

I did some tests about emulated pmem via memmap=, kdump kernel hangs or
just reboots early during compressing kernel, no clue how to handle it.
Since for kdump kernel kaslr is pointless a workaround is use "nokaslr"

In Fedora or RHEL, just add "nokaslr" in KDUMP_COMMANDLINE_APPEND
in /etc/sysconfig/kdump 

Can you try if this works?

Thanks
Dave