linux/arch
Ingo Molnar 5dfaf90f80 x86: mm: Read cr2 before prefetching the mmap_lock
Prefetch instructions can generate spurious faults on certain
models of older CPUs. The faults themselves cannot be stopped
and they can occur pretty much anywhere - so the way we solve
them is that we detect certain patterns and ignore the fault.

There is one small path of code where we must not take faults
though: the #PF handler execution leading up to the reading
of the CR2 (the faulting address). If we take a fault there
then we destroy the CR2 value (with that of the prefetching
instruction's) and possibly mishandle user-space or
kernel-space pagefaults.

It turns out that in current upstream we do exactly that:

	prefetchw(&mm->mmap_sem);

	/* Get the faulting address: */
	address = read_cr2();

This is not good.

So turn around the order: first read the cr2 then prefetch
the lock address. Reading cr2 is plenty fast (2 cycles) so
delaying the prefetch by this amount shouldnt be a big issue
performance-wise.

[ And this might explain a mystery fault.c warning that sometimes
  occurs on one an old AMD/Semptron based test-system i have -
  which does have such prefetch problems. ]

Cc: Mathieu Desnoyers <mathieu.desnoyers@polymtl.ca>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Cc: Pekka Enberg <penberg@cs.helsinki.fi>
Cc: Vegard Nossum <vegard.nossum@gmail.com>
Cc: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@goop.org>
Cc: Hugh Dickins <hugh.dickins@tiscali.co.uk>
LKML-Reference: <20090616030522.GA22162@Krystal>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
2009-06-16 10:23:32 +02:00
..
alpha
arm Merge branch 'for-2.6.31' of git://git.kernel.dk/linux-2.6-block 2009-06-11 11:10:35 -07:00
avr32
blackfin
cris
frv FRV: Implement new-style ptrace 2009-06-11 09:01:26 -07:00
h8300
ia64 Merge branch 'kvm-updates/2.6.31' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/virt/kvm/kvm 2009-06-11 10:03:30 -07:00
m32r
m68k
m68knommu
microblaze
mips Merge branch 'irq-for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tip/linux-2.6-tip 2009-06-10 15:25:41 -07:00
mn10300 MN10300: Add utrace/tracehooks support 2009-06-11 09:02:20 -07:00
parisc
powerpc Merge branch 'perfcounters-for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tip/linux-2.6-tip 2009-06-11 14:01:07 -07:00
s390 KVM: s390: Verify memory in kvm run 2009-06-10 11:48:57 +03:00
sh sh: Tie sparseirq in to Kconfig. 2009-06-11 10:33:09 +03:00
sparc Merge branch 'futexes-for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tip/linux-2.6-tip 2009-06-10 16:16:48 -07:00
um
x86 x86: mm: Read cr2 before prefetching the mmap_lock 2009-06-16 10:23:32 +02:00
xtensa
.gitignore
Kconfig