Re: Tough Issue: kernel instruction corruption

Gavin Shan
2008-07-05T15:27:37Z

>> Hello, I'm faced a tough issue recently: instructions of kernel
>> were corrupted. There has 2 PCI buses on my board and lots
>> of PCI devices with DMA capabality involved. I'm suspecting
>> the kernel instructions were corrupted by DMA operations driving
>> by those PCI devices with DMA capabality.
>>
>> Anybody have tried to protect kernel instructions from this case
>> or have any ideas to protect kernel text section?
>
> if you have a modern Intel board, you can enable the IOMMU on it that
> will protect the kernel text (well, all of memory) from rogue DMA.
> PPC generally has similar capabilities, as do some IBM x86 chipsets.

PPC is used now and PPC doesn't have 2 kinds of MMUs. I don't know much
about IOMMU. Is it part of CPU?

>
> Without an IOMMU it's basically impossible to protect against such DMA.

I did a google with "instruction"+"corruption"+"DMA" and found one matched
patent. And I go through the datasheet of PCI chips on my board, unfortunately,
the PCI chip didn't supply address protection from vager DMA.

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2005/0182862.html

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