x86/mm: Disallow running with 32-bit PTEs to work around erratum

The Intel(R) Xeon Phi(TM) Processor x200 Family (codename: Knights
Landing) has an erratum where a processor thread setting the Accessed
or Dirty bits may not do so atomically against its checks for the
Present bit.  This may cause a thread (which is about to page fault)
to set A and/or D, even though the Present bit had already been
atomically cleared.

These bits are truly "stray".  In the case of the Dirty bit, the
thread associated with the stray set was *not* allowed to write to
the page.  This means that we do not have to launder the bit(s); we
can simply ignore them.

If the PTE is used for storing a swap index or a NUMA migration index,
the A bit could be misinterpreted as part of the swap type.  The stray
bits being set cause a software-cleared PTE to be interpreted as a
swap entry.  In some cases (like when the swap index ends up being
for a non-existent swapfile), the kernel detects the stray value
and WARN()s about it, but there is no guarantee that the kernel can
always detect it.

When we have 64-bit PTEs (64-bit mode or 32-bit PAE), we were able
to move the swap PTE format around to avoid these troublesome bits.
But, 32-bit non-PAE is tight on bits.  So, disallow it from running
on this hardware.  I can't imagine anyone wanting to run 32-bit
non-highmem kernels on this hardware, but disallowing them from
running entirely is surely the safe thing to do.

Signed-off-by: Dave Hansen <[email protected]>
Cc: Andrew Morton <[email protected]>
Cc: Andy Lutomirski <[email protected]>
Cc: Borislav Petkov <[email protected]>
Cc: Brian Gerst <[email protected]>
Cc: Dave Hansen <[email protected]>
Cc: Denys Vlasenko <[email protected]>
Cc: H. Peter Anvin <[email protected]>
Cc: Josh Poimboeuf <[email protected]>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <[email protected]>
Cc: Luis R. Rodriguez <[email protected]>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <[email protected]>
Cc: Thomas Gleixner <[email protected]>
Cc: Toshi Kani <[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected]
Cc: [email protected]
Cc: [email protected]
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/[email protected]
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <[email protected]>

1 files changed, 1 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/arch/x86/boot/boot.h b/arch/x86/boot/boot.h
index 9011a88353de..a5ce666a2423 100644
--- a/arch/x86/boot/boot.h
+++ b/arch/x86/boot/boot.h
@@ -294,6 +294,7 @@ static inline int cmdline_find_option_bool(const char *option)
 
 /* cpu.c, cpucheck.c */
 int check_cpu(int *cpu_level_ptr, int *req_level_ptr, u32 **err_flags_ptr);
+int check_knl_erratum(void);
 int validate_cpu(void);
 
 /* early_serial_console.c */