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[RFC] Verification and debugging of memory initialisation
Boot initialisation has always been a bit of a mess with a number of ugly points. While significant amounts of the initialisation is architecture-independent, it trusts of the data received from the architecture layer. This was a mistake in retrospect as it has resulted in a number of difficult-to-diagnose bugs. This patchset is an RFC to add some validation and tracing to memory initialisation. It also introduces a few basic defencive measures and depending on a boot parameter, will perform additional tests for errors "that should never occur". I think this would have reduced debugging time for some boot-related problems. The last part of the patchset is a similar fix for the patch "[patch] mm: sparsemem memory_present() memory corruption" that corrects a few more areas where similar errors were made. I'm not looking to merge this as-is obviously but are there opinions on whether this is a good idea in principal? Should it be done differently or not at all? -- Mel Gorman Part-time Phd Student Linux Technology Center University of Limerick IBM Dublin Software Lab |
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