[patch] ia64: Order of operations bug in PT_LOAD segment reader

[Simon Horman]

On Tue, Oct 21, 2008 at 09:52:27AM -0700, Jay Lan wrote:
> Simon Horman wrote:
> 
> Hi Simon,
> 
> Just got back from vacation. Sorry for late response.
> 
> > This bug was discovered by Jay Lan and he also proposed this fix, however
> > thee is some discussion about what if any related changes should be made at
> > the same time.
> > 
> > The bug comes about because the break statment was never executed because
> > the if clause would bever be true because the if clause will never be true
> > because &  has higher precedence than !=.
> > 
> > My position on this is that with the if logic fixed, as per this patch, the
> > break statment and the rest of the while() loop makes sense and should work
> > as intended.
> > 
> > As I understand it, Jay's position is that the code should be simplified,
> > after all it never worked as intended.
> > 
> > There is a related kernel bug that lead Jay to discover this problem.
> > The kernel bug has been resolved by Tony Luck and was
> > included in Linus's tree between 2.6.27-rc8 and 2.6.27-rc9 as
> > "[IA64] Put the space for cpu0 per-cpu area into .data section".
> > 
> > Now that the kernel bug is out of the way, I am providing this patch to
> > continue discussion on what to do on the kexec-tools side of things.  I do
> > not intend to apply this patch until there is some conclusion in the
> > discussion between Jay and myself.
> 
> I think this patch is not right for two reasons:
> 1) The if-statement below has never proved the correctness of
>    its intent because the 'break' statement never got executed
>    due to a logic error.
>   		if (loaded_segments[loaded_segments_num].end !=
> 			(phdr->p_paddr & ~(ELF_PAGE_SIZE-1)))
> 			break;
> 2) With your patch in my testing, the kdump kernel boot hung
>    even earlier in a PAL_CALL that was not returned to the kernel.
>    I understand that my test case was based on a kernel without
>    Tony's latest fix, but that was the only situation we can
>    see the if-statement becomes true. I do not know any other
>    way to make a memory gap happen. However, when it happens,
>    your patch only makes kdump kenrel boot hang earlier.
> 
> I still root for my patch because the kdump kernel would boot
> correctly even if a memory gap indeed happened. ;) However,
> if you do not feel comfortable with my patch, i think the best
> alternative is to take out the if-statement above completely.

Point taken, just to clarify, this is the patch you would like merged?


From: Jay Lan <jlan at sgi.com>

IA64: better calculate PT_LOAD segment size

This patch combines consecutive PL_LOAD segments into one.
The end address of the last PL_LOAD segment, calculated by
adding p_memsz to p_paddr & rounded up to ELF_PAGE_SIZE,
will be the end address of this loaded_segments[] entry.

This patch fixes the kdump kernel MCA problem caused by under-
allocation of memory and a "kdump broken on ALtix 350" problem
reported by Bernhard Walle.

Simon, this patch replaces my previous patch I submitted on the
underallocation issue.

Signed-off-by: Jay Lan <jlan at sgi.com>

---
 kexec/arch/ia64/crashdump-ia64.c |   15 ++++++++-------
 1 file changed, 8 insertions(+), 7 deletions(-)

Index: kexec-tools/kexec/arch/ia64/crashdump-ia64.c
===================================================================
--- kexec-tools.orig/kexec/arch/ia64/crashdump-ia64.c	2008-09-19 14:33:07.593344017 -0700
+++ kexec-tools/kexec/arch/ia64/crashdump-ia64.c	2008-09-19 17:39:03.732928237 -0700
@@ -86,19 +86,20 @@ static void add_loaded_segments_info(str
                 loaded_segments[loaded_segments_num].end =
 			loaded_segments[loaded_segments_num].start;
 
+		/* Consolidate consecutive PL_LOAD segments into one.
+		 * The end addr of the last PL_LOAD segment, calculated by
+		 * adding p_memsz to p_paddr & rounded up to ELF_PAGE_SIZE,
+		 * will be the end address of this loaded_segments entry.
+		 */
 		while (i < ehdr->e_phnum) {
 			phdr = &ehdr->e_phdr[i];
 	                if (phdr->p_type != PT_LOAD)
 	                        break;
-			if (loaded_segments[loaded_segments_num].end !=
-				phdr->p_paddr & ~(ELF_PAGE_SIZE-1))
-				break;
-			loaded_segments[loaded_segments_num].end +=
-				(phdr->p_memsz + ELF_PAGE_SIZE - 1) &
-				~(ELF_PAGE_SIZE - 1);
+			loaded_segments[loaded_segments_num].end =
+				(phdr->p_paddr + phdr->p_memsz +
+				ELF_PAGE_SIZE - 1) & ~(ELF_PAGE_SIZE - 1);
 			i++;
 		}
-
 		loaded_segments_num++;
 	}
 }