Re: Improper handling of unaligned user address access?

["Steven J. Hill" <sjhill@realitydiluted.com>]

Mike Uhler wrote:
>>
>>This looks like the unaligned access in a branch delay slot problem I
>>experienced a while ago, where the CPU doesn't set the BD flag if the branch is
>>not taken. Can you please try the patch I posted?
> 
> 
> In this particular case, it would appear that it's not the delay slot problem.
> According to the Cause value above, BD is set, and EPC has been rolled
> back to point at the branch.  That all looks consistent to me.
> 
> Note that the lwl will not take an unaligned exception, and the Cause code
> value indicates a TLB miss.  I don't have the full context of the problem,
> but is 0xA (i.e., virtual page zero) actually a valid address?  If not,
> that's the cause of the problem.
> 
You are correct. 0xA is NOT actually a valid address which is the
problem. I believe the kernel should handle things more gracefully
and return EFAULT instead of killing the process. This code of mine
worked fine in an older 2.4.7 kernel. Why was 'verify_area' taken
out of 'traps.c' by the way?

> By the way, having the oops message put out the BadVAddr and PRId CP0 registers
> would be very helpful.
> 
Here it is:

    <1>Unable to handle kernel paging request at virtual address 000000a,
      epc == 8025f00c, ra == 8011c3d4
    <1>BADVADDR = 00000000, CP0_PRID = 00002d22
    Oops in fault.c:do_page_fault, line 201:
    $0 : 00000000 00000012 0000001a 0000001a 8789ff18 0000000a 00000008
      7fff7d58
    $8 : 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 71236429 2aaa8000 7fff77f8
      2aaa83f8
    $16: 8789ff18 7fff7d58 00000000 00000001 004009b4 00000000 00000000
      00000000
    $24: 00000000 00401638                   8789e000 8789ff08 7fff7d20
      8011c3d4
    Hi : 00000007
    Lo : 00000000
    epc  : 8025f00c    Tainted: P
    Status: 3000fc03
    Cause : 90000008

The processor is a TX4927.

-Steve