H. Peter Anvin wrote:In other words, reusing the early page tables isn't all that straightforward. It may easily be that it's better to build a new set of page tables from scratch, however, it would *still* be beneficial to have the early page tables be in the same format as the later one, since it lets us use the fixmap area, and therefore {bt,early}_ioremap() much sooner.
Yes, and it simplifies Xen as it always starts guest domains in the appropriate pagetable mode and doesn't let the guest change it on the fly. If early_ioremap depends on non-PAE early pagetables in an otherwise PAE kernel, we'd need to go to some effort to make sure all the early_ioremap stuff is skipped (which would be possible but unpleasant for domU, but very bad in dom0).