Skip to content
Commit 4dc2287c authored by Bjorn Helgaas's avatar Bjorn Helgaas Committed by Jesse Barnes
Browse files

x86: avoid E820 regions when allocating address space

When we allocate address space, e.g., to assign it to a PCI device, don't
allocate anything mentioned in the BIOS E820 memory map.

On recent machines (2008 and newer), we assign PCI resources from the
windows described by the ACPI PCI host bridge _CRS.  On many Dell
machines, these windows overlap some E820 reserved areas, e.g.,

    BIOS-e820: 00000000bfe4dc00 - 00000000c0000000 (reserved)
    pci_root PNP0A03:00: host bridge window [mem 0xbff00000-0xdfffffff]

If we put devices at 0xbff00000, they don't work, probably because
that's really RAM, not I/O memory.  This patch prevents that by removing
the 0xbfe4dc00-0xbfffffff area from the "available" resource.

I'm not very happy with this solution because Windows solves the problem
differently (it seems to ignore E820 reserved areas and it allocates
top-down instead of bottom-up; details at comment 45 of the bugzilla
below).  That means we're vulnerable to BIOS defects that Windows would not
trip over.  For example, if BIOS described a device in ACPI but didn't
mention it in E820, Windows would work fine but Linux would fail.

Reference: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16228


Acked-by: default avatarH. Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com>
Signed-off-by: default avatarBjorn Helgaas <bjorn.helgaas@hp.com>
Signed-off-by: default avatarJesse Barnes <jbarnes@virtuousgeek.org>
parent 30919b0b
0% or .
You are about to add 0 people to the discussion. Proceed with caution.
Finish editing this message first!
Please register or to comment