Re: [GIT PULL] x86 setup: correct booting on 486DX4

From: H. Peter Anvin
Date: Sun Nov 04 2007 - 18:37:42 EST


Linus Torvalds wrote:

On Sun, 4 Nov 2007, Linus Torvalds wrote:
I'm not entirely sure that it needs to be a long-jump, btw. I think any
regular branch is sufficient. You obviously *do* need to make the long jump later (to reload %cs in protected mode), but I'm not sure it's needed in that place. I forget the exact rules (but they definitely were documented).

Hmm. The original Linux code did

movw $1, %ax
lmsw %ax
jmp flush_instr
flush_instr:

and I think that was straigh out of the documentation. So yeah, I think that's the right fix - not a longjmp (which in itself is dangerous: it potentially behaves *differently* on different CPU's, since some CPU's may do the long jump with pre-protected-mode semantics, while others will do it with protected mode already in effect!)


Just looked it up; it was a bit hard to find (it is Intel vol 3 page 9-27, at least in the version I have), but you're right -- the documentation only demands a short jump here, not a long jmp (which actually makes sense given what I remembered that a long jump should be deferrable here.) So yes, that is definitely the right fix and avoids the ugly mixing of code.

I'll update the patch.

-hpa
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