Re: [PATCH] x86: use pgd accessors when cloning a pgd range.

From: H. Peter Anvin
Date: Wed Oct 27 2010 - 13:43:10 EST


On 10/27/2010 10:31 AM, Jeremy Fitzhardinge wrote:
On 10/27/2010 10:18 AM, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
On 10/27/2010 9:50 AM, Jeremy Fitzhardinge wrote:

This never used to be a problem. Perhaps we can change how
clone_pgd_range is used at boot time to avoid it in the Xen case (since
we don't care about the secondary pagetable)?


Xen shouldn't have any users of this, since it's used for low-level
operations like SMP bootstrap, suspend to RAM, reboot and low-level
BIOS functionality.


Right, but it is being called smack in the middle of setup_arch(). It
looks like they could be hidden away in
native_pagetable_setup_start/done though.


This is what makes me absolutely hate paravirt with a passion... "let's hid things away in <obscure place> and make it absolutely impossible to either follow the code flow or figure out what the intended semantics are supposed to be." (Let not even get me started on how ill-defined the semantics of some of the paravirt operations are.) In this case, at the most you need a single flag of state... or you could even just ignore this low-level data structure that you will never use in the first place. Ian's message just mentioned "a failure" and never described in any way what kind of "failure" it was.

-hpa


--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/