Re: [PATCH-resend] mm/hwpoison: Clear PRESENT bit for kernel 1:1 mappings of poison pages

Andrew Morton
2017-08-17T22:10:02Z

On Wed, 16 Aug 2017 10:18:03 -0700 "Luck, Tony" <tony.luck@intel.com> wrote:

> Speculative processor accesses may reference any memory that has a
> valid page table entry. While a speculative access won't generate
> a machine check, it will log the error in a machine check bank. That
> could cause escalation of a subsequent error since the overflow bit
> will be then set in the machine check bank status register.
>
> Code has to be double-plus-tricky to avoid mentioning the 1:1 virtual
> address of the page we want to map out otherwise we may trigger the
> very problem we are trying to avoid. We use a non-canonical address
> that passes through the usual Linux table walking code to get to the
> same "pte".
>
> Thanks to Dave Hansen for reviewing several iterations of this.

It's unclear (to lil ole me) what the end-user-visible effects of this
are.

Could we please have a description of that? So a) people can
understand your decision to cc:stable and b) people whose kernels are
misbehaving can use your description to decide whether your patch might
fix the issue their users are reporting.

Thanks.