On architectures that use percpu-vm, the percpu region is not guaranteed to be contiguous in physical space. However, fs/proc/vmcore.c expects all ELF notes to be contiguous. If the ELF note happens to occupy two non-adjacent physical pages, part of the note may be read from an incorrect memory location by the kdump kernel, resulting in failure to initialize /proc/vmcore (if the content of the following physical page, incorrectly interpreted as an ELF note specifies a large number), wrong register values or other apparent random memory corruption. There is currently no mechanism to pass the virtual-to-physical mapping of the percpu allocation to the kdump kernel. So, instead, I'm changing the alignment of the ELF note buffer. Since sizeof(note_buf_t) is less than PAGE_SIZE, aligning the buffer to the nearest higher power of 2 is enough to make sure that the buffer cannot cross a page boundary, effectively ensuring that the whole buffer is contiguous in physical space. Signed-off-by: Petr Tesarik <ptesarik at suse.cz> --- kernel/kexec.c | 3 ++- 1 file changed, 2 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/kernel/kexec.c b/kernel/kexec.c index 2bee072..cdab59d 100644 --- a/kernel/kexec.c +++ b/kernel/kexec.c @@ -1610,7 +1610,8 @@ void crash_save_cpu(struct pt_regs *regs, int cpu) static int __init crash_notes_memory_init(void) { /* Allocate memory for saving cpu registers. */ - crash_notes = alloc_percpu(note_buf_t); + crash_notes = __alloc_percpu(sizeof(note_buf_t), + roundup_pow_of_two(sizeof(note_buf_t))); if (!crash_notes) { pr_warn("Kexec: Memory allocation for saving cpu register states failed\n"); return -ENOMEM; -- 1.8.4.5