Impact: fix guest kernel boot crash on certain configs
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.
Signed-off-by: Chris Lalancette <clalance@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy.fitzhardinge@citrix.com>
Cc: Chris Lalancette <clalance@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
9f32d21c98