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Commit a1e46212 authored by Suresh Siddha's avatar Suresh Siddha Committed by Ingo Molnar
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x86: fix page attribute corruption with cpa()

Impact: fix sporadic slowdowns and warning messages

This patch fixes a performance issue reported by Linus on his
Nehalem system. While Linus reverted the PAT patch (commit
58dab916

) which exposed the issue,
existing cpa() code can potentially still cause wrong(page attribute
corruption) behavior.

This patch also fixes the "WARNING: at arch/x86/mm/pageattr.c:560" that
various people reported.

In 64bit kernel, kernel identity mapping might have holes depending
on the available memory and how e820 reports the address range
covering the RAM, ACPI, PCI reserved regions. If there is a 2MB/1GB hole
in the address range that is not listed by e820 entries, kernel identity
mapping will have a corresponding hole in its 1-1 identity mapping.

If cpa() happens on the kernel identity mapping which falls into these holes,
existing code fails like this:

	__change_page_attr_set_clr()
		__change_page_attr()
			returns 0 because of if (!kpte). But doesn't
			set cpa->numpages and cpa->pfn.
		cpa_process_alias()
			uses uninitialized cpa->pfn (random value)
			which can potentially lead to changing the page
			attribute of kernel text/data, kernel identity
			mapping of RAM pages etc. oops!

This bug was easily exposed by another PAT patch which was doing
cpa() more often on kernel identity mapping holes (physical range between
max_low_pfn_mapped and 4GB), where in here it was setting the
cache disable attribute(PCD) for kernel identity mappings aswell.

Fix cpa() to handle the kernel identity mapping holes. Retain
the WARN() for cpa() calls to other not present address ranges
(kernel-text/data, ioremap() addresses)

Signed-off-by: default avatarSuresh Siddha <suresh.b.siddha@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: default avatarVenkatesh Pallipadi <venkatesh.pallipadi@intel.com>
Cc: <stable@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: default avatarIngo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
parent 552b8aa4
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