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Date: Thu, 23 Aug 2018 08:44:37 -0700
From: Andi Kleen <ak@linux.intel.com>
To: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>,
        Ingo Molnar <mingo@redhat.com>,
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        linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org,
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        George Anchev <studio@anchev.net>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] x86/speculation/l1tf: fix off-by-one error when warning
 that system has too much RAM
Message-ID: <20180823154437.GC12066@tassilo.jf.intel.com>
References: <20180823134418.17008-1-vbabka@suse.cz>
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On Thu, Aug 23, 2018 at 03:44:18PM +0200, Vlastimil Babka wrote:
> Two users have reported [1] that they have an "extremely unlikely" system
> with more than MAX_PA/2 memory and L1TF mitigation is not effective. In fact
> it's a CPU with 36bits phys limit (64GB) and 32GB memory, but due to holes
> in the e820 map, the main region is almost 500MB over the 32GB limit:

Ah I see it's a client part with very large DIMMs and someone being
very brave and using that much memory without ECC.

> 
> [    0.000000] BIOS-e820: [mem 0x0000000100000000-0x000000081effffff] usable
> 
> Suggestions to use 'mem=32G' to prefer L1TF mitigation while losing the 500MB
> revealed, that there's an off-by-one error in the check in
> l1tf_select_mitigation(). l1tf_pfn_limit() returns the last usable pfn
> (inclusive), but it's more common and hopefully less error-prone to return the
> first pfn that's over limit, so this patch changes that and updates the other
> callers.

I can see the off by one, but does it really cause the user's problem?

They will be still over the limit in any case, with or without off-by-one.

So the description has nothing to do with the fix. Or do I miss something?

-Andi