Re: [RFT PATCH] x86/pat: Fix set_mce_nospec() for pmem

[Borislav Petkov <bp@alien8.de>]

On Thu, Sep 30, 2021 at 01:39:03PM -0700, Dan Williams wrote:
> Yes, that's a good way to think about it. The only way to avoid poison
> for page allocator pages is to just ditch the page. In the case of
> PMEM the driver can do this fine grained dance because it gets precise
> sub-page poison lists to consult and implements a non-mmap path to
> access the page contents.

Ok, good.

Now, before we do anything further here, I'd like for this very much
non-obvious situation to be documented in detail so that we know what's
going on there and what that whole_page notion even means. Because this
is at least bending the meaning of page states like poison and what that
really means for the underlying thing - PMEM or general purpose DIMMs.

And then that test could be something like:

	/*
	 * Normal DRAM gets poisoned as a whole page, yadda yadda...
	 /
	if (whole_page) {

	/*
	 * Special handling for PMEM case, driver can handle accessing sub-page ranges
	 * even if the whole "page" is poisoned, blabla
	} else {
		rc = _set_memory_uc(decoy_addr, 1);
	...

so that it is crystal clear what's going on there.

Thx!

-- 
Regards/Gruss,
    Boris.

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