[PATCH} 2.6.24-rc8-mm1 - x86_64 PAT issues with vesafb and NVidia cards

From: Valdis . Kletnieks
Date: Mon Jan 21 2008 - 13:53:35 EST


(Gerd Knorr cc'ed because 'git blame' says he last touched the line of code
I ended up touching - if this needs other cc:'s, will somebody who knows who
should review please add them?)

On Thu, 17 Jan 2008 02:35:14 PST, Andrew Morton said:
> ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/akpm/patches/2.6/2.6.24-rc8/2.6.24-rc8-mm1/

This gave the NVidia binary driver indigestion:

X:2772 conflicting cache attribute d0000000-d0006000 uncached<->default

While researching this one and adding some debugging printk's and dump_stack()s,
I found that this was caused by:

[ 0.444051] reserve_mattr swapper:1 setting d0000000-d0500000 to default
[ 0.444055] Pid: 1, comm: swapper Not tainted 2.6.24-rc8-mm1 #4
[ 0.444057]
[ 0.444057] Call Trace:
[ 0.444065] [<ffffffff8034dfe7>] ? ioremap_page_range+0x17b/0x244
[ 0.444069] [<ffffffff802259ba>] reserve_mattr+0x91/0x27d
[ 0.444072] [<ffffffff80224c24>] __ioremap+0xe6/0x146
[ 0.444077] [<ffffffff806f7297>] vesafb_probe+0x196/0x6b2
...

So the vesafb driver had decided to tag an even *larger* space as 'default'..
I'm *guessing* that in fact, this area should have been non-caching (since
it's the video memory for the card), but nothing cared/flagged before.

Pigheaded-and-probably-wrong brute-force fix that works on my laptop, but
somebody who actually understands the vesafb code should check that in fact
the space *should* be non-caching.

Signed-off-by: Valdis Kletnieks <valdis.kletnieks@xxxxxx>

--- linux-2.6.24-rc8-mm1/drivers/video/vesafb.c.dist 2007-10-09 16:31:38.000000000 -0400
+++ linux-2.6.24-rc8-mm1/drivers/video/vesafb.c 2008-01-20 11:11:57.000000000 -0500
@@ -286,7 +286,7 @@ static int __init vesafb_probe(struct pl
info->pseudo_palette = info->par;
info->par = NULL;

- info->screen_base = ioremap(vesafb_fix.smem_start, vesafb_fix.smem_len);
+ info->screen_base = ioremap_nocache(vesafb_fix.smem_start, vesafb_fix.smem_len);
if (!info->screen_base) {
printk(KERN_ERR
"vesafb: abort, cannot ioremap video memory 0x%x @ 0x%lx\n",


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