Re: [PATCH] x86/pci: make pci_mem_start to be aligned only -v3
From: Ingo Molnar
Date: Thu Apr 16 2009 - 13:29:29 EST
* Yinghai Lu <yinghai@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Ingo Molnar wrote:
> > * Linus Torvalds <torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> >> On Thu, 16 Apr 2009, Jesse Barnes wrote:
> >>> Any comments on this one, Linus? Should I include your ack?
> >> I'm not ready to ack it, no. I don't think the suggested patch is very
> >> clean or necessarily sensible as-is. It seems very ad-hoc.
> >>
> >> I was literally thinking of something like
> >> "round up from the last RAM by X"
> >> "round up from the last reserved region by Y"
> >> "pick the bigger of the two"
> >>
> >> with helper functions for the two cases and comments along the
> >> lines of why we do it. Something that was a bit more obvious about
> >> what it's doing and why.
> >
> > That's sensible - but i'd also like to inject hpa's add-on idea: if
> > we do that then we should do it _explicitly_ and _visibly_, by
> > injecting an artificial e820 reservation range to all expected
> > "vulnerable" holes we cannot fully trust.
> >
> > We'd do that after all the fixed resources are allocated, but before
> > dynamic PCI allocations.
> >
> > That prevents the PCI layer from dynamically allocating anything
> > into that protective zone, and documents it as well (and makes it
> > visible in boot logs, etc.) - instead of just a silent rule
> > somewhere that no-one will really see if it breaks.
>
> that need to do done much earlier, and much simple, just need to
> make that range to be reserved in e820. and later e820_setup_gap
> even don't need to be aligned again.
Well, an alignment _check_ could still be added with a
WARN_ONCE(), to make sure these assumptions hold true in
future as well.
This kind of stuff is generally not testable and wont break on many
systems - but it can easily cripple a random 0.5% of systems,
creating a lot of unhappy users.
So pretty much the only solution is to be careful, robust and
redundant all along.
Ingo
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