Re: [GIT PULL] x86/urgent for v5.13-rc5

From: Sasha Levin
Date: Sun Jun 06 2021 - 19:11:14 EST


On Mon, Jun 07, 2021 at 12:07:58AM +0200, Borislav Petkov wrote:
On Sun, Jun 06, 2021 at 02:23:21PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
On Sun, Jun 6, 2021 at 1:58 PM Mike Rapoport <rppt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> A while ago hpa said:
>
> As far as I know, Windows 7 actually reserves all memory below
> 1 MiB to avoid BIOS bugs.
>
> (https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16661#c2)

It would be good to have that checked somehow.

I don't think this matters on any machine with gigs of RAM, but I do
wonder about the people who want to do small configurations. Maybe
they've given up on x86?

It also eats into that somewhat precious legacy DMA resource and eats
up a fair chunk of that. Again, not an issue on modern hardware, but
..

> I believe that reserving everything below 1M after the real mode trampoline
> is allocated reduces amount of hidden dependencies and makes things simpler
> overall.

Simpler, perhaps, and _I_ personally don't care about about 512kB of
memory any more on any machines I have, but ..

Let's see if Sasha can dig out something... CCed.

@Sasha, can you figure out who we can talk to whether Windoze reserves
the first megabyte of memory unconditionally?

That's a great question, but I can't help there anymore :)

Adding James Morris...

--
Thanks,
Sasha