From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S266243AbUHTKmh (ORCPT ); Fri, 20 Aug 2004 06:42:37 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S266248AbUHTKmh (ORCPT ); Fri, 20 Aug 2004 06:42:37 -0400 Received: from herkules.viasys.com ([194.100.28.129]:15796 "HELO mail.viasys.com") by vger.kernel.org with SMTP id S266243AbUHTKmd (ORCPT ); Fri, 20 Aug 2004 06:42:33 -0400 Date: Fri, 20 Aug 2004 13:42:30 +0300 From: Ville Herva To: petr@vandrovec.name Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, Andrew Morton Subject: 2.6.8.1-mm2 breaks vmware Message-ID: <20040820104230.GH23741@viasys.com> Reply-To: vherva@viasys.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.4.1i X-Operating-System: Linux herkules.viasys.com 2.4.27 Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org 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. 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 get_user_pages-latency-fix.patch increase-mlock-limit-to-32k.patch mlock-as-user-for-268-rc2-mm2.patch (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. 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. 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. -- v -- v@iki.fi