Messages in this thread | | | From | Mel Gorman <> | Subject | [PATCH 0/4] [RFC] Verification and debugging of memory initialisation | Date | Wed, 16 Apr 2008 14:50:58 +0100 (IST) |
| |
Boot initialisation has always been a bit of a mess with a number of ugly points. While significant amounts of the initialisation is architecture-independent, it trusts of the data received from the architecture layer. This was a mistake in retrospect as it has resulted in a number of difficult-to-diagnose bugs.
This patchset is an RFC to add some validation and tracing to memory initialisation. It also introduces a few basic defencive measures and depending on a boot parameter, will perform additional tests for errors "that should never occur". I think this would have reduced debugging time for some boot-related problems. The last part of the patchset is a similar fix for the patch "[patch] mm: sparsemem memory_present() memory corruption" that corrects a few more areas where similar errors were made.
I'm not looking to merge this as-is obviously but are there opinions on whether this is a good idea in principal? Should it be done differently or not at all?
-- Mel Gorman Part-time Phd Student Linux Technology Center University of Limerick IBM Dublin Software Lab
| |