Re: RFC: i386: kill !4KSTACKS

["linux-os \(Dick Johnson\)" <linux-os@analogic.com>]

On Tue, 6 Sep 2005, Giridhar Pemmasani wrote:

> Jan Kiszka wrote:
>
>> The only way I see is to switch stacks back on ndiswrapper API entry.
>> But managing all those stacks correctly is challenging, as you will
>> likely not want to create a new stack on each switching point. Rather,
>
> This is what I had in mind before I saw this thread here. I, in fact, did
> some work along those lines, but it is even more complicated than you
> mentioned here: Windows uses different calling conventions (STDCALL,
> FASTCALL, CDECL) so switching stacks by copying arguments/results gets
> complicated. So I gave up on that approach. For X86-64 drivers we use
> similar approach, but for that there is only one calling convention and we
> don't need to switch stacks, but reshuffle arguments on stack / in
> registers.
>
> I am still hoping that Andi's approach is possible (I don't understand how
> we can make kernel see current info from private stack).
>
> Giri

You can't without copying info from one stack to another. There are
other problems, also, the only place you can get data for a stack in the
kernel dynamically is from kmalloc(GFP_ATOMIC). Other kmalloc() data
are paged which may (will) cause a double-fault if you use it for
a stack. You are not going to get much more than a page of GFP_ATOMIC
data so you can't really make a larger stack than the existing
process/kernel stack.

I have tried to just allocate data when a module is installed (in the
.bss or .data segments as static data). Unfortunately, some kernel
code traps this as a "triple fault" if I try to use it for a stack,
even though the kernel segments for ES, SS, DS, all point to the
same area(s).

I think the purpose of compressing the stack was to get rid of
NDIS, but that's only a theory. Currently, they did a good job
of it!

Cheers,
Dick Johnson
Penguin : Linux version 2.6.13 on an i686 machine (5589.54 BogoMips).
Warning : 98.36% of all statistics are fiction.
.
I apologize for the following. I tried to kill it with the above dot :

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