Re: [RFC PATCH] x86, espfix: use spin_lock rather than mutex

From: Ingo Molnar
Date: Fri May 15 2015 - 02:54:26 EST



* H. Peter Anvin <hpa@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On 05/14/2015 02:27 PM, Borislav Petkov wrote:
> > Remove stable@ from CC.
> >
> > On Thu, May 14, 2015 at 08:29:55PM +0200, Ingo Molnar wrote:
> >> We could allocate them on the boot CPU side and hand them over to
> >> the secondary CPU.
> >
> > Yeah, something along those lines. I mean, they're allocated and
> > in-use during the complete system lifetime, we might just as well
> > allocate them all in one go. Btw, what's our allocator that early,
> > memblock?
> >
> > Still, what I find strange is why are we seeing this only now? Is
> > it because it had to be a big box (cpu >= 128) or something else
> > changed...?
> >
>
> Quite probable. You don't really want to allocate them until you
> know if a CPU at least exists, though.
>
> I like Ingo's suggestion of allocating them before CPU bringup on
> the initiating CPU.

The only slightly subtle detail with that is to use alloc_pages_node()
with the secondary CPU's node, to make sure the espfix stack is
NUMA-local to the CPU that is going to use it.

Thanks,

Ingo
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