Re: [PATCH 5/6] ARM: ux500: Enable HIGHMEM on all mop500 platforms

[Lee Jones]

On 01/08/12 09:41, Russell King - ARM Linux wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 01, 2012 at 08:56:14AM +0100, Lee Jones wrote:
> > On 31/07/12 23:01, Russell King - ARM Linux wrote:
> > > On Tue, Jul 31, 2012 at 08:50:02PM +0000, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> > > > On Tuesday 31 July 2012, Russell King - ARM Linux wrote:
> > > > > I still fail to see how not having highmem enabled would ever cause memory
> > > > > corruption errors (unless something dealing with memory in a very very
> > > > > wrong way - iow, not using one of the reservation or memory allocation
> > > > > methods provided by the kernel.)
> > > >
> > > > The problem is that all users of ux500 systems pass a command line like
> > > >
> > > > vmalloc=256M mem=128M@0 mali.mali_mem=32M@128M hwmem=168M@160M mem=48M@328M mem_issw=1M@383M mem=640M@384M
> > > >
> > > > This is of course totally bogus and should not be done. If I understand
> > > > Lee correctly, one of the issues resulting from passing a command
> > > > line like this without enabling highmem is memory corruption.
> > >
> > > But the question is _why_ does that corruption happen.
> > >
> > >   From the above, we will end up with the kernel getting:
> > >
> > > 0x00000000 - 0x07ffffff (128M @ 0)
> > > 0x14800000 - 0x177fffff (48M  @ 328M)
> > > 0x18000000 - 0x3fffffff (640M @ 384M)
> > >
> > > with:
> > >
> > > 0x08000000 - 0x081fffff used for mali
> > > 0x0a000000 - 0x147fffff used for hwmem
> > > 0x17f00000 - 0x17ffffff used for mem_issw
> > >
> > > Now, with highmem disabled, the kernel should still map exactly the
> > > regions: 0x00000000 - 0x07ffffff, 0x14800000 - 0x177fffff, into the
> > > direct mapped region, and truncate the 0x18000000 - 0x3fffffff
> > > region appropriately, reducing the amount of memory available such
> > > that it won't overlap the vmalloc area (which you've specified to be
> > > a minimum of 256M.)
> > >
> > > This should _NOT_ cause any memory corruption.
> > >
> > > So, come on guys.  Debugging is *mandatory* for this kind of problem.
> > > Papering over it is obscene.
> >
> > Actually I didn't go any further with it, as I changed to another
> > identical piece of hardware and couldn't reproduce the issue.
> >
> > FYI, here's the boot log from the broken board:
> >
> > http://paste.ubuntu.com/1102017/
>
> Well, the good thing is this:
>
>     8 Truncating RAM at 18000000-3fffffff to -2c3fffff (vmalloc region overlap).
>
> which means the RAM was properly truncated before it is passed to
> memblock, etc.
>
> That oops dump looks very much like an ASoC problem, where
> dapm_widget_power_check() recurses into dapm_supply_check_power()
> which then recurses back into dapm_widget_power_check(), and it
> eventually overflows the kernel stack, corrupting the thread_info
> and the pages below.
>
> Given the address of the stack pointer (ebc480a8) I don't think
> we can be too sure where it was supposed to be, and where the top
> of stack should have been, so we don't know how many pages have
> been stomped on and corrupted.
>
> Stopping that recursion is the first thing that needs to be done
> so that the cause of it can then be properly debugged without the
> kernel itself corrupting memory below the kernel stack.

Those were my thoughts.

Here was my cry for help: https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/7/23/181

--
Lee Jones
Linaro ST-Ericsson Landing Team Lead
Linaro.org â Open source software for ARM SoCs
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