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xen: Fix Xen domU boot with batched mprotect

PATCH Applied Jeremy Fitzhardinge 2 participants 2 messages Oct 24, 2008 – Oct 27, 2008

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PATCH 1/1 xen: Fix Xen domU boot with batched mprotect

From: Chris Lalancette <[email protected]>

Recent i686 2.6.27 kernels with a certain amount of memory (between 736 and 855MB) have a problem booting under a hypervisor that supports batched mprotect (this includes the RHEL-5 Xen hypervisor as well as any 3.3 or later Xen hypervisor). The problem ends up being that xen_ptep_modify_prot_commit() is using virt_to_machine to calculate which pfn to update. However, this only works for pages that are in the p2m list, and the pages coming from change_pte_range() in mm/mprotect.c are kmap_atomic pages. Because of this, we can run into the situation where the lookup in the p2m table returns an INVALID_MFN, which we then try to pass to the hypervisor, which then (correctly) denies the request to a totally bogus pfn.

The right thing to do is to use arbitrary_virt_to_machine, so that we can be sure we are modifying the right pfn. This unfortunately introduces a performance penalty because of a full page-table-walk, but we can avoid that penalty for pages in the p2m list by checking if virt_addr_valid is true, and if so, just doing the lookup in the p2m table.

The attached patch implements this, and allows my 2.6.27 i686 based guest with 768MB of memory to boot on a RHEL-5 hypervisor again. Thanks to Jeremy for the suggestions about how to fix this particular issue.

---
arch/x86/xen/mmu.c | 18 ++++++++++++++----

1 file changed, 14 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-)

===================================================================

arch/x86/xen/mmu.c +0 -0
@@ -246,11 +246,21 @@ xmaddr_t arbitrary_virt_to_machine(void *vaddr)
{
	unsigned long address = (unsigned long)vaddr;
	unsigned int level;

- pte_t *pte = lookup_address(address, &level);
- unsigned offset = address & ~PAGE_MASK;
+ pte_t *pte;
+ unsigned offset;

- BUG_ON(pte == NULL);
+ /*
+ * if the PFN is in the linear mapped vaddr range, we can just use
+ * the (quick) virt_to_machine() p2m lookup
+ */
+ if (virt_addr_valid(vaddr))
+ return virt_to_machine(vaddr);

+ /* otherwise we have to do a (slower) full page-table walk */
+
+ pte = lookup_address(address, &level);
+ BUG_ON(pte == NULL);

+	offset = address & ~PAGE_MASK;
	return XMADDR(((phys_addr_t)pte_mfn(*pte) << PAGE_SHIFT) + offset);
}

@@ -410,7 +420,7 @@ void xen_ptep_modify_prot_commit(struct mm_struct *mm, unsigned long addr,

	xen_mc_batch();

- u.ptr = virt_to_machine(ptep).maddr | MMU_PT_UPDATE_PRESERVE_AD;

+	u.ptr = arbitrary_virt_to_machine(ptep).maddr | MMU_PT_UPDATE_PRESERVE_AD;
	u.val = pte_val_ma(pte);
	xen_extend_mmu_update(&u);
Applied
#1 lore raw
Quoted 27 lines · Jeremy Fitzhardinge

From: Chris Lalancette <[email protected]>

Recent i686 2.6.27 kernels with a certain amount of memory (between 736 and 855MB) have a problem booting under a hypervisor that supports batched mprotect (this includes the RHEL-5 Xen hypervisor as well as any 3.3 or later Xen hypervisor). The problem ends up being that xen_ptep_modify_prot_commit() is using virt_to_machine to calculate which pfn to update. However, this only works for pages that are in the p2m list, and the pages coming from change_pte_range() in mm/mprotect.c are kmap_atomic pages. Because of this, we can run into the situation where the lookup in the p2m table returns an INVALID_MFN, which we then try to pass to the hypervisor, which then (correctly) denies the request to a totally bogus pfn.

The right thing to do is to use arbitrary_virt_to_machine, so that we can be sure we are modifying the right pfn. This unfortunately introduces a performance penalty because of a full page-table-walk, but we can avoid that penalty for pages in the p2m list by checking if virt_addr_valid is true, and if so, just doing the lookup in the p2m table.

The attached patch implements this, and allows my 2.6.27 i686 based guest with 768MB of memory to boot on a RHEL-5 hypervisor again. Thanks to Jeremy for the suggestions about how to fix this particular issue.

Quoted 5 lines

---
arch/x86/xen/mmu.c | 18 ++++++++++++++----

1 file changed, 14 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-)

applied to tip/x86/urgent, thanks!

Ingo