• Mikael Pettersson's avatar
    [PATCH] boot_cpu_data corruption on SMP x86 · 1ae90c54
    Mikael Pettersson authored
    The patch below eliminates a case of boot_cpu_data corruption
    on SMP x86 machines. This was first observed on SMP Athlons,
    but it also affects SMP Intel boxes in a less serious way.
    
    When the secondary processors boot and execute head.S:checkCPUtype,
    the code performs a 32-bit write of a small constant to the
    byte-sized variable boot_cpu_data.x86 (X86 in head.S). Since the
    write is 32-bit, it also writes zeros to the following 3 bytes,
    which clobbers the x86_vendor, x86_model, and x86_mask fields
    previously set up by check_bugs()'s call to identify_cpu().
    Thus, after smp_init(), boot_cpu_data will _always_ identify
    the CPU as an Intel (X86_VENDOR_INTEL == 0 in processor.h) with
    model 0 and stepping 0.
    
    The effect in standard kernels is not catastrophic, since:
    (a) most SMP x86 boxes are Intel
    (b) most uses of x86_vendor occur before smp_init() or reference
        the SMP cpu_data[] array
    (c) most post-boot references to boot_cpu_data occur in the
        cpu_has_XXX macros which only read the x86_capability[] array
    However, third-party extensions (like my x86 performance-monitoring
    conters driver) can get seriously confused by this mis-identification.
    1ae90c54
head.S 10.7 KB