visible memory seems wrong in kexec crash dump kernel

Scott Wood scottwood at freescale.com
Mon Jul 29 19:10:36 EDT 2013


On 07/13/2013 01:30:50 AM, Chris Friesen wrote:
> On 07/12/2013 04:59 PM, Chris Friesen wrote:
>> On 07/12/2013 03:08 PM, Chris Friesen wrote:
>> 
>>> I turned on the instrumentation in early_init_dt_scan_memory() and  
>>> got
>>> the following when jumping to the capture kernel:
>>> 
>>> memory scan node memory, reg size 16, data: 0 0 2 0,
>>> - 0 , 200000000
>>> 
>>> That 0x200000000 matches the fact that I'm seeing 8GB of memory
>>> available in the recovery kernel.
>>> 
>>> If I boot the original kernel with "crashkernel=224M at 32M", should I
>>> expect that only 224MB is marked as "linux,usable-memory" in the
>>> recovery kernel?
>> 
>> I started looking at the kexec side of things, and I noticed  
>> something a
>> bit odd. In most places dealing with the device tree in kexec it  
>> accepts
>> either "memory" or "memory@" for the memory node name. In
>> add_usable_mem_property() in arch/ppc64/fs2dt.c it seems to only  
>> accept
>> "memory@".
>> 
>> Is this expected behaviour? It seems to be the same in current git
>> versions of kexec-tools.
>> 
>> On my system I see "/proc/device-tree/memory".
>> 
>> If I modify add_usable_mem_property() to also accept "/memory" then  
>> my
>> recovery kernel boots up with
>> 
>> physicalMemorySize = 0x10000000
>> 
>> which is 256MB (which is still a bit odd since I specified 224MB for  
>> the
>> crashkernel).
>> 
>> However, it then hits the BUG() call at the end of mark_bootmem() in
>> mm/bootmem.c.
> 
> One final thing and I'll stop replying to myself. :)
> 
> It looks like the problem is that some board-specific freescale code  
> was calling lmb_reserve() with a base address in the 4GB range.  It  
> seems odd that lmb_reserve() didn't throw some kind of error when the  
> recovery kernel was supposed to be limited to 224MB.
> 
> Rather than try and fix the bug, I turned off the (unneeded) config  
> options related to the above lmb_reserve() calls and was able to  
> successfully access the information I needed via /dev/oldmem.
> 
> The upshot is that there seems to be a number of things that could be  
> improved:
> 
> 1) kexec should accept "/memory" and not just "/memory@"
> 2) lmb_reserve() should really respect the crashkernel memory limit
> 3) the freescale stuff really shouldn't assume it can map things  
> wherever it feels like

What "board-specific freescale code" are you referring to?

-Scott



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