[PATCH] boot_cpu_data corruption on SMP x86
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.
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