Hi David, On Wed, Apr 30, 2014 at 11:49:33AM +0100, David Woodhouse wrote: > There could be all kinds of existing mappings in the DMA page tables, > and I'm not sure it's safe to preserve them. What prevents the crashdump > kernel from trying to use any of the physical pages which are > accessible, and which could thus be corrupted by stray DMA? > > In fact, the old kernel could even have set up 1:1 passthrough mappings > for some devices, which would then be able to DMA *anywhere*. Surely we > need to prevent that? Ideally we would prevent that, yes. But the problem is that a failed DMA transaction might put the device into an unrecoverable state. Usually any in-flight DMA transactions should only target buffers set up by the previous kernel and not corrupt any data. > After the last round of this patchset, we discussed a potential > improvement where you point every virtual bus address at the *same* > physical scratch page. That is a solution to prevent the in-flight DMA failures. But what happens when there is some in-flight DMA to a disk to write some inodes or a new superblock. Then this scratch address-space may cause filesystem corruption at worst. So with this in mind I would prefer initially taking over the page-tables from the old kernel before the device drivers re-initialize the devices. Joerg
