On Wed, 4 Apr 2007, Eric W. Biederman wrote:

quoted text
> > And the bisection winner is
> >
> > 	i386-irq-kill-nr_irq_vectors-and-increase-nr_irqs.patch
> >
> > I don't immediately see how it could be causing it, so adding CCs which 
> > are listed in the patch.
> Weird.  I will have to look at that in a little more detail.
> Do you know if this problem happens on x86_64? What does your .config 
> look like? What does /proc/interrupts look like? What kind of hardware 
> you running this kernel on? Can anyone else reproduce this?
> The oops clearly shows something using -1 and calling that as an
> address I don't know why, but I'm guessing I have triggered a memory
> stomp somewhere.  I think this is the first time I have seen a small
> negative number causing a NULL pointer dereference.
> That patch looks innocuous enough that either:
> - I just missed changing something I should have.
> - Your configuration has an increase in NR_IRQS and that triggered
>   something.
> - The patch simply permuted things so a memory stomp now happens
>   on the e1000 data structures instead of somewhere else.
> - Something doesn't like large irq numbers.
> This work is essentially a backport from x86_64 so if your hardware
> is 64bit capable testing that should be a fairly easy test, and be
> able to rule out large irq numbers as the culprit.
> Until I get a good look at -mm I'm going to have a hard time guessing.
> But a roving memory stomp is my best guess.

Hi Eric,

after struggling with this issue for some time, I think that it's just 
some incosistent usage of NR_IRQS throughout the source probably due to 
some include hell. I really don't understand the how the mach-*/ includes 
are supposed to work.

I found out (by disassembling resulting vmlinux binaries) that in 
arch/i386/kernel/entry.S, the loop in irq_entries_start does too little 
iterations compared to NR_IRQS value as seen in for example io_apic.c

The super-stupid proof-patch below fixes the panic on my system. It's just 
to demonstrate that the i386 includes really need fixing to be consistent 
somehow.

diff --git a/arch/i386/kernel/entry.S b/arch/i386/kernel/entry.S
index 976438c..b20dc07 100644
--- a/arch/i386/kernel/entry.S
+++ b/arch/i386/kernel/entry.S
@@ -53,6 +53,8 @@
 #include <asm/dwarf2.h>
 #include "irq_vectors.h"
 
+#define NR_IRQS 4096
+
 /*
  * We use macros for low-level operations which need to be overridden
  * for paravirtualization.  The following will never clobber any registers:

-- 
Jiri Kosina
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