Re: [PATCH v7u1 00/31] x86, boot, 64bit: Add support for loadingramdisk and bzImage above 4G

From: H. Peter Anvin
Date: Wed Jan 16 2013 - 12:38:35 EST


On 01/16/2013 09:31 AM, Yinghai Lu wrote:

rom af4f3bc044d1556f89bd488c7ea75e2a162bb273 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Yinghai Lu <yinghai@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 14 Jan 2013 21:11:05 -0800
Subject: [PATCH] x86, mm: Fix page table early allocation offset checking

During debugging loading kernel above 4G, found that one page is not used
in pre-allocated BRK area for early page allocation.

pgt_buf_top is address that can not be used, so should check if that new
end is above that top, otherwise last page will not be used.


The first sentence here doesn't parse, and this description doesn't give any hint to anyone who is researching this code in say, five years, what problems this caused.

I can't really figure it out, either; from looking at the thread and the patch I'm assuming the problem is somehow that the code failed to use the last page in the brk buffer, which somehow lead to a Xen boot failure... but the bits from here to there are totally unclear.

-hpa

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

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