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

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Date:   Wed, 12 Apr 2017 16:40:37 +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 04/12/17 at 04:24pm, Dave Young wrote:
> 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?

Oops, your problem is normal boot instead of kdump so this is two
different problems. Seems we have not met your bug yet..

Thanks
Dave