From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: David Mosberger Date: Mon, 02 Jun 2003 18:19:05 +0000 Subject: RE: [Linux-ia64] [PATCH] MCA recovery for TLB faults for 2.4 Message-Id: List-Id: References: In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: linux-ia64@vger.kernel.org >>>>> On Mon, 2 Jun 2003 10:00:28 -0700, "Luck, Tony" said: Tony> At the moment the trust level is extremely high. Linux Tony> doesn't even provide a checksum for the ia64_os_mca_dispatch Tony> entry code when it registers it with the SAL. That's true. Tony> A checksum in the list of saved translations would only be Tony> part of reducing the level of trust ... we'd also need to Tony> validate that the entire code path has the correct code (not Tony> just the entry point). There are several other data items on Tony> which the code also relies which a truly paranoid MCA handler Tony> would also need to validate. I probably just don't understand what the plan is here. Are you planning to fix everything in one fell swoop? If not, I think incrementally improving the situation makes sense (i.e., if you work on piece X, make X as solid as possible; over time do this for more and more pieces of the MCA subsystem). There is no doubt that making the entire MCA subsystem as robust as possible involves a huge amount of rather tricky work. Same goes for the INIT path, of course (there are obvious ways to deadlock it right now; probably something that could benefit from a reasonably generic lock-busting infrastructure). --david