On Thu, 7 Dec 2000 richardj_moore@uk.ibm.com wrote:
> Which surely we can on today's x86 systems. Even back in the days of OS/2
> 2.0 running on a 386 with 4Mb RAM we used a taskgate for both NMI and
> Double Fault. You need only a minimal stack - 1K, sufficient to save state
> and restore ESP to a known point before switching back to the main TSS to
> allow normal exception handling to occur.
The memory hit is surely not a problem.
> There's no problem under MP since the double fault exception will be only
> presented on the processor that instigated the problem.
But what if another double fault happens on another CPU at roughly the
same time (unlikely, but still...)?
> As for NMIs I didn't think they were presented to all processors
> simultaneously. If they are then the way to handle that is to map a page of
> the GDT, to a unique physical address per-processor - i.e. processor
> local storage. The virtual address will be the same on each. This is what
> we did under OS/2 SMP.
Good idea.
> The only time you want the NMI handler to be fast is when it's being used
> for hand-shaking, which some disk devices do. And perhaps for APIC NMI
> class interprocessor interrupts. But I honestly don't think that's really a
> good enough reason not to have a task gate for NMI.
Do we really want to waste 60000+ CPU cycles every second just to handle
a TSS switch?
> The unpredictablility of the abort (NMI or Double-fault) refers to fact
> that in general it is indeterminate as to whether it is a fault or trap.
NMI is a normal interrupt (fault-like) and not an abort. It's fully
predictable.
> And that's a matter of whether the EIP point at ot after the instruction
> related to the exception. The abort nature of theses exceptions is not
> really a problem for the exception handler.
If you get a double fault during retrieving a CPU state from a TSS, you
may end with an inconsistent state -- you may be unable to iretd or use
the stack. For NMIs it doesn't happen -- an NMI event, if happens during
a TSS switch, will not be handled until the switch completes.
-- + Maciej W. Rozycki, Technical University of Gdansk, Poland + +--------------------------------------------------------------+ + e-mail: macro@ds2.pg.gda.pl, PGP key available +- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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