Re: [PATCH 3/3] ARM: allow kernel to be loaded in middle of phymem

[Russell King - ARM Linux]

On Thu, Jan 23, 2014 at 02:15:07PM -0500, Nicolas Pitre wrote:
> On Wed, 22 Jan 2014, Wang Nan wrote:
> 
> > This patch allows the kernel to be loaded at the middle of kernel awared
> > physical memory. Before this patch, users must use mem= or device tree to cheat
> > kernel about the start address of physical memory.
> > 
> > This feature is useful in some special cases, for example, building a crash
> > dump kernel. Without it, kernel command line, atag and devicetree must be
> > adjusted carefully, sometimes is impossible.
> 
> With CONFIG_PATCH_PHYS_VIRT the value for PHYS_OFFSET is determined 
> dynamically by rounding down the kernel image start address to the 
> previous 16MB boundary.  In the case of a crash kernel, this might be 
> cleaner to simply readjust __pv_phys_offset during early boot and call 
> fixup_pv_table(), and then reserve away the memory from the previous 
> kernel.  That will let you access that memory directly (with gdb for 
> example) and no pointer address translation will be required.

We already have support in the kernel to ignore memory below the calculated
PHYS_OFFSET.  See 571b14375019c3a66ef70d4d4a7083f4238aca30.

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