Re: [PATCH 1/4] x86, gart: Don't enforce GART aperture lower-boundby alignment

[H. Peter Anvin]

On 04/18/2011 07:56 AM, Roedel, Joerg wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 18, 2011 at 10:45:19AM -0400, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
>> On 04/18/2011 06:45 AM, Joerg Roedel wrote:
>>> This patch changes the allocation of the GART aperture to
>>> enforce only natural alignment instead of aligning it on
>>> 512MB. This big alignment was used to force the GART
>>> aperture to be over 512MB. This is enforced by using 512MB
>>> as the lower-bound address in the allocation range.
>>>
>>> Cc: Yinghai Lu <yinghai@xxxxxxxxxx>
>>> Signed-off-by: Joerg Roedel <joerg.roedel@xxxxxxx>
>>
>> Better implementation of the existing bounds, yes, but I think the
>> algorithm is still wrong.  Specifically, 512 MiB seems to have been the
>> maximum address of the kernel at some point, but that is historic at
>> this point, at least on 64 bits.
> 
> I am fine with a smaller lower-bound, but I am not sure what a better
> choice is. The comment about kexec seems to be valid. It shouldn't matter
> for kdump because in this case the memory is allocated independently and
> the kdump kernel will only use this part, but for other kexec uses it is
> a bit harder. Probably any number we choose as a lower bound is an
> arbitrary choice at some point. But I am open for
> suggestions/corrections to this.
> 

The right thing to do for in-place kexec it to turn it off, not rely on
any specific magic addresses.  We have had this problem with a number of
drivers in the context of kexec.

	-hpa

-- 
H. Peter Anvin, Intel Open Source Technology Center
I work for Intel.  I don't speak on their behalf.

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