Re: ce56a86e2a ("x86/mm: Limit mmap() of /dev/mem to valid physical addresses"): kernel BUG at arch/x86/mm/physaddr.c:79!

From: Linus Torvalds
Date: Thu Oct 26 2017 - 15:29:30 EST


On Thu, Oct 26, 2017 at 9:02 PM, Ingo Molnar <mingo@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Well, 'mem=2048M' shouldn't really limit device memory, it's supposed to limit
> (trim) 'RAM' and not much else.

Agreed. You should very much be able to map in IO memory or whatever
above the 2G address even if the high_memory itself might be limited
to 2GB.

So I think that commit ce56a86e2ade ("x86/mm: Limit mmap() of /dev/mem
to valid physical addresses") is wrong, in that "high_memory" is very
much the wrong thing to test.

The memory mapping limit might validly be something like

1ull << boot_cpu_data.x86_phys_bits

or similar, but for now I suspect that the right thing to do is to
revert. I'm not convinced that our "x86_phys_bits" value is guaranteed
to be always right, since I think we mainlyjust use it for showing
things, rather than have lots of code that depends on it.

Ingo?

Linus