From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S266273AbUHTKxo (ORCPT ); Fri, 20 Aug 2004 06:53:44 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S266295AbUHTKxo (ORCPT ); Fri, 20 Aug 2004 06:53:44 -0400 Received: from fw.osdl.org ([65.172.181.6]:55741 "EHLO mail.osdl.org") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S266273AbUHTKx1 (ORCPT ); Fri, 20 Aug 2004 06:53:27 -0400 Date: Fri, 20 Aug 2004 03:51:42 -0700 From: Andrew Morton To: vherva@viasys.com Cc: petr@vandrovec.name, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: 2.6.8.1-mm2 breaks vmware Message-Id: <20040820035142.3bcdb1cb.akpm@osdl.org> In-Reply-To: <20040820104230.GH23741@viasys.com> References: <20040820104230.GH23741@viasys.com> X-Mailer: Sylpheed version 0.9.7 (GTK+ 1.2.10; i386-redhat-linux-gnu) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Ville Herva wrote: > > Andrew, I know you are not interested in closed source vmware, I'm just > blatantly Cc'ing you in case you would have some suggestion of the top of > your head. As stuff slowly trickles from -mm to mainline, this could > eventually end up biting more people. > > In short, there are two (afaict) separate problem: > > (1) vmmon.ko gives this: > > vmmon: Your kernel is br0ken. get_user_pages(current, current->mm, b7dd1000, 1, 1, 0, &page, NULL) returned -14. > vmmon: I'll try accessing page tables directly, but you should know that your > vmmon: kernel is br0ken and you should uninstall all additional patches you > vmmon: have installed! > vmmon: FYI, copy_from_user(b7dd1000) returns 0 (if not 0 maybe your kernel is not br0ken) > > (2) vmware fails to start any guest os, telling it cannot allocate memory: > > VMX|[msg.msg.noMem] Cannot allocate memory. > > > (1) happened with 2.6.6-mm4 and with 2.6.8.1-mm2. > (2) only happened with 2.6.8.1-mm2 (with 2.6.6-mm4 vmware worked despite the > warning. Try -mm3, please. It'll have the same problem. > So I backed out these patches from 2.6.8.1-mm2: > > flexible-mmap-2.6.7-mm3-A8.patch > flex-mmap-for-ppc64.patch > flex-mmap-for-s390x.patch > sysctl-tunable-for-flexmmap.patch These have all been lumped together in mm3. Try setting /proc/sys/vm/legacy_va_layout to 1 > get_user_pages-latency-fix.patch It won't be this. > increase-mlock-limit-to-32k.patch > mlock-as-user-for-268-rc2-mm2.patch Unlikely to be these. > (All conveniently available for reference at ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/akpm/patches/2.6/2.6.8.1/2.6.8.1-mm2/broken-out/ > if anyone is interested) > > I had a vague hunch that flex-mmap stuff might affect (2) and > get_user_pages patch perhaps (1). > > After this, problem (1) went away for 2.6.8.1-mm2, but problem (2) remained. Try setting /proc/sys/vm/overcommit_memory to 1 > Then I tried 2.6.8.1 vanilla. It does NOT suffer from either (1) or (2). > > All experiments are done with Petr Vandrovec's newest > vmware-any-any-update81 (apart from 2.6.6-mm4 that had some older any-to-any > patch) and VMwareWorkstation-3.2.0-2230. Maybe Peter could take a look sometime? > Before I continue backing stuff out: does anyone have ideas or suggestions > what -mm patches might be suspectible problem (2)? 2.6.8.1 -> 2.6.8.1-mm2 is > rather large patch and so is 2.6.6-mm4 -> 2.6.8.1-mm2, and the patches > listed above were everything I thought might be suspectible. > > Could get_user_pages-latency-fix.patch explain (1)? My kernel expertise is > not sufficient to tell. Doubtful.