Re: [Xen-devel] x86-64 problem with invalid page fault in linux 2.6.16-rc1

[Keir Fraser <Keir.Fraser@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On SMP systems we need the guest to handle spurious page-not-present 
faults at any time and at any virtual address. This is a side effect of 
the writable pagetable implementation.
If the vmalloc_fault path no longer covers all of the kernel virtual 
address space then a spurious-fault detection needs to be added before 
oops'ing the kernel.
Alternatively it would be quite reasonable to extend the writable 
pagetable implementation to exclude areas of the virtual address space 
from being subject to batched wrpt updates. Updates to such areas would 
be emulated synchronously. This would be a good thing anyway -- updates 
to kernel va space rarely occur in batches and so emulation would 
improve performance.
 -- Keir

On 20 Jan 2006, at 15:50, Jan Beulich wrote:

> I'm just trying to see if anyone has any clue about this, which only 
> appears to happen with MP guests:
> Since the check for the modules area is gone in 2.6.16's 
> vmalloc_fault() (and we appropriately merged this change to
> the Xen files), we are now seeing page faults in the module area, 
> where a subsequent software page table walk shows all
> page table entries present, and a get_user from inside the 
> hypervisor's or the guest's page fault handler also succeeds.
> The module in the questionable space was loaded significantly before 
> the page fault occurs, and we never saw a fault
> after the system fully booted. Faults of this kind may have existed 
> before, but would have been hidden by the
> vmalloc_fault() handling assuming that another processor would have 
> put in place the pgd entry meanwhile.
> Since I have no clue how such a fault could be raised in the first 
> place (given that the pgd entry for the modules area
> is shared with main kernel code, all lower level entries are shared 
> across kernel and all processes, and the fault
> happens on an access to the modules area from kernel code 
> [guaranteeing that the system isn't unintentionally running
> with the user mode page tables]).
>
> I can also mostly rule out any sort of hardware problem since the 
> issue is visible on both Intel and AMD processors.
> Thanks for any thoughts, hints, or pointers,
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