On 04/15/2014 07:15 AM, David Vrabel wrote:
> If a fault on a kernel address is due to a non-present page, then it
> cannot be the result of stale TLB entry from a protection change (RO
> to RW or NX to X). Thus the pagetable walk in spurious_fault() can be
> skipped.
Erk... this code is screaming WTF to me. The x86 architecture is such
that the CPU is responsible for avoiding these faults.
<dig> <dig> <dig>
5b727a3b0158a129827c21ce3bfb0ba997e8ddd0
x86: ignore spurious faults
When changing a kernel page from RO->RW, it's OK to leave stale TLB
entries around, since doing a global flush is expensive and they
pose no security problem. They can, however, generate a spurious
fault, which we should catch and simply return from (which will
have the side-effect of reloading the TLB to the current PTE).
This can occur when running under Xen, because it frequently changes
kernel pages from RW->RO->RW to implement Xen's pagetable semantics.
It could also occur when using CONFIG_DEBUG_PAGEALLOC, since it
avoids doing a global TLB flush after changing page permissions.
Signed-off-by: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jer...@xensource.com>
Cc: Harvey Harrison <harvey.harri...@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mi...@elte.hu>
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <t...@linutronix.de>
Again WTF?
Are we chasing hardware errata here? Or did someone go off and *assume*
that the x86 hardware architecture work a certain way? Or is there
something way more subtle going on?
I guess next step is mailing list archaeology...
Does anyone still have contacts with Jeremy, and if so, could they poke
him perhaps?
-hpa
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