Re: [PATCH]Fix broken VMI in 2.6.27-rc..

From: Jeremy Fitzhardinge
Date: Fri Aug 08 2008 - 02:10:55 EST


H. Peter Anvin wrote:
Jeremy Fitzhardinge wrote:

The Linux kernel was never a paragon of perfection - it was never meant to be. Just because a bit of cruft went unnoticed into the kernel doesn't mean we shouldn't fix it.

I don't really see what the issue is.

Fixmaps are primarily used for things that need to be mapped early before we can allocate address space dynamically. They're predominantly used for boot-time init, and rarely on any performance-critical path. The only vaguely regular use a fixmap gets during runtime is poking at apics, and that's dominated by IO time, and kmap_atomic. Statically, there's only 100 references in the kernel. And it only affects 32-bit.

Having fixmaps at link-time fixed addresses would be nice, I suppose, but hardly worth going to vast effort over.


No, but it's hardly vast effort, either.

Thinking about it, the fixmap really has to be as high as possible. If it were any lower, then it would either truncate the 1:1 mapping, or shadow some physical memory.

J
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