Re: [crash, bisected] Re: [PATCH 3/4] x86_64: Fold pda into per cpuarea

From: Jeremy Fitzhardinge
Date: Fri Jun 06 2008 - 04:30:18 EST


Mike Travis wrote:
Ingo Molnar wrote:
* Mike Travis <travis@xxxxxxx> wrote:

* Declare the pda as a per cpu variable.

* Make the x86_64 per cpu area start at zero.

* Since the pda is now the first element of the per_cpu area, cpu_pda()
is no longer needed and per_cpu() can be used instead. This also makes
the _cpu_pda[] table obsolete.

* Since %gs is pointing to the pda, it will then also point to the per cpu
variables and can be accessed thusly:

%gs:[&per_cpu_xxxx - __per_cpu_start]

Based on linux-2.6.tip
-tip testing found an instantaneous reboot crash on 64-bit x86, with this config:

http://redhat.com/~mingo/misc/config-Thu_Jun__5_11_43_51_CEST_2008.bad

there is no boot log as the instantaneous reboot happens before anything is printed to the (early-) serial console. I have bisected it down to:

| 7670dc09e89a2b151a1cf49eccebc07c41c2ce9f is first bad commit
| commit 7670dc09e89a2b151a1cf49eccebc07c41c2ce9f
| Author: Mike Travis <travis@xxxxxxx>
| Date: Tue Jun 3 17:30:21 2008 -0700
|
| x86_64: Fold pda into per cpu area

the big problem is not just this crash, but that the patch is _way_ too big:

arch/x86/Kconfig | 3 +
arch/x86/kernel/head64.c | 34 ++++++--------
arch/x86/kernel/irq_64.c | 36 ++++++++-------
arch/x86/kernel/setup.c | 90 ++++++++++++---------------------------
arch/x86/kernel/setup64.c | 5 --
arch/x86/kernel/smpboot.c | 51 ----------------------
arch/x86/kernel/traps_64.c | 11 +++-
arch/x86/kernel/vmlinux_64.lds.S | 1 include/asm-x86/percpu.h | 48 ++++++--------------
9 files changed, 89 insertions(+), 190 deletions(-)

considering the danger involved, this is just way too large, and there's no reasonable debugging i can do in the bisection to narrow it down any further.

Please resubmit with the bug fixed and with a proper splitup, the more patches you manage to create, the better. For a dangerous code area like this, with a track record of frequent breakages in the past, i would not mind a "one line of code changed per patch" splitup either. (Feel free to send a git tree link for us to try as well.)

Ingo

Thanks for the feedback Ingo. I'll test the above config and look at
splitting up the patch. The difficulty is making each patch independently
compilable and testable.

FWIW, I'm getting past the "crashes very, very early" stage with this series applied when booting under Xen. Then it crashes pretty early, but that's not your fault...

J
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