Jesse Barnes <[email protected]> writes:
> On Tuesday, June 12, 2007 6:11:21 Eric W. Biederman wrote:
>> Jesse Barnes <[email protected]> writes:
>> > On some machines, buggy BIOSes don't properly setup WB MTRRs to
>> > cover all available RAM, meaning the last few megs (or even gigs)
>> > of memory will be marked uncached. Since Linux tends to allocate
>> > from high memory addresses first, this causes the machine to be
>> > unusably slow as soon as the kernel starts really using memory
>> > (i.e. right around init time).
>> >
>> > This patch works around the problem by scanning the MTRRs at
>> > boot and figuring out whether the current end_pfn value (setup
>> > by early e820 code) goes beyond the highest WB MTRR range, and
>> > if so, trimming it to match. A fairly obnoxious KERN_WARNING
>> > is printed too, letting the user know that not all of their
>> > memory is available due to a likely BIOS bug.
>>
>> A quick update. This patch is horribly incorrect on a socket F
>> opteron/Athlon 64 with memory above 4GB.
>>
>> In particular those cpus are capable of mapping all of memory
>> above 4GB as write back without using a single MTRR.
>>
>> So examining MTRRs is insufficient.
>
> Hm, yuck. What do you suggest? Should we only run this check when Intel
> chips are present? Checking only the bottom 4G isn't sufficient since we've
> seen platforms that have issues above that range...
My gut feel says that we need to call a function that is potentially cpu specific,
older AMD cpus and Intel cpus can just use the generic mtrr code.
I would also suggest we build a list of ranges of write-back memory. Which
until we handle overlapping MTRRs in the generic MTRR case is just the write-back
MTRRs.
Then we get the data in a linux specific form we can check the linux specific
data structure against the e820 map.
I don't think that is going to much harder and it allows for creative cpu
designers.
Although this suggests that we want to worry about all memory holes as
well. Because I have seen at least one system which failed to cover
the lower 4G with MTRRs. While everything above 4G was fine.
Eric
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