From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-path: Received: from 8bytes.org ([85.214.48.195] helo=mail.8bytes.org) by bombadil.infradead.org with esmtp (Exim 4.80.1 #2 (Red Hat Linux)) id 1X2KfA-0001IP-OJ for kexec@lists.infradead.org; Wed, 02 Jul 2014 13:33:29 +0000 Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by mail.8bytes.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 5A2FE12B339 for ; Wed, 2 Jul 2014 15:33:01 +0200 (CEST) Date: Wed, 2 Jul 2014 15:32:59 +0200 From: Joerg Roedel Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/8] iommu/vt-d: Fix crash dump failure caused by legacy DMA/IO Message-ID: <20140702133258.GN26537@8bytes.org> References: <1398386198-19304-1-git-send-email-bill.sumner@hp.com> <1398854973.12733.23.camel@i7.infradead.org> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <1398854973.12733.23.camel@i7.infradead.org> List-Id: List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: "kexec" Errors-To: kexec-bounces+dwmw2=infradead.org@lists.infradead.org To: David Woodhouse Cc: indou.takao@jp.fujitsu.com, bhe@redhat.com, linux-pci@vger.kernel.org, kexec@lists.infradead.org, "Hoemann, Jerry" , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, iommu@lists.linux-foundation.org, doug.hatch@hp.com, ishii.hironobu@jp.fujitsu.com, bhelgaas@google.com, zhenhua@hp.com, Bill Sumner Hi David, On Wed, Apr 30, 2014 at 11:49:33AM +0100, David Woodhouse wrote: > There could be all kinds of existing mappings in the DMA page tables, > and I'm not sure it's safe to preserve them. What prevents the crashdump > kernel from trying to use any of the physical pages which are > accessible, and which could thus be corrupted by stray DMA? > > In fact, the old kernel could even have set up 1:1 passthrough mappings > for some devices, which would then be able to DMA *anywhere*. Surely we > need to prevent that? Ideally we would prevent that, yes. But the problem is that a failed DMA transaction might put the device into an unrecoverable state. Usually any in-flight DMA transactions should only target buffers set up by the previous kernel and not corrupt any data. > After the last round of this patchset, we discussed a potential > improvement where you point every virtual bus address at the *same* > physical scratch page. That is a solution to prevent the in-flight DMA failures. But what happens when there is some in-flight DMA to a disk to write some inodes or a new superblock. Then this scratch address-space may cause filesystem corruption at worst. So with this in mind I would prefer initially taking over the page-tables from the old kernel before the device drivers re-initialize the devices. Joerg _______________________________________________ kexec mailing list kexec@lists.infradead.org http://lists.infradead.org/mailman/listinfo/kexec