• Paul Mackerras's avatar
    [PATCH] PPC64: close firmware stdin · f81cb7ae
    Paul Mackerras authored
    We recently found a problem that was causing memory corruption during boot
    on IBM POWER5 machines.  The problem was that the if you have a USB
    keyboard and it is set to the input device for the firmware, it will still
    be active when the kernel is started.  That means that the OHCI controller
    has pointers to various memory areas that it polls for transfers to do. 
    When we start using that same memory in the kernel, bad things can happen. 
    (This isn't a problem on powermacs because the Apple OF implements a
    "quiesce" call which turns off all the devices it is using.)
    
    This patch fixes the problem by calling the Open Firmware "close" method
    for the input device.  Stephen Rothwell and I have verified that doing this
    fixes the problem on the POWER5 machine where we observed it.  I verified
    that this patch doesn't cause any problems on powermacs.
    
    I think this patch should go into 2.6.10 since it fixes a nasty memory
    corruption bug that can cause rather subtle and hard-to-diagnose problems
    during boot.  (The symptom on the POWER5 machine with the particular kernel
    that we were using was that reading /proc/net/tcp would oops, due to one of
    the pointers in tcp_ehash being corrupted.)
    Signed-off-by: default avatarPaul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
    f81cb7ae
prom_init.c 46.8 KB