On Sat, 4 Oct 2008, Jesse Brandeburg wrote:
quoted text
> > Exactly. The access to a ro region results in a fault. I have nowhere
> > seen that trigger, but I can reproduce the trylock() WARN_ON, which
> > confirms that there is concurrent access to the NVRAM registers. The
> > backtrace pattern is similar to the one you have seen.
> 
> are you still getting WARN_ON *with* all the mutex based fixes already applied?

The WARN_ON triggers with current mainline. Is there any fixlet in
Linus tree missing ?

quoted text
> with the mutex patches in place (without protection patch) we are
> still reproducing the issue, until we apply the set_memory_ro patch.

That does not make sense to me. If the memory_ro patch is providing
_real_ protection then you _must_ run into an access violation. If not,
then the patch just papers over the real problem in some mysterious
way.

The patch does:

+	set_memory_rw((unsigned long)hw->flash_address,
+	              hw->flash_len >> PAGE_SHIFT);
 	writew(val, hw->flash_address + reg);
+	set_memory_ro((unsigned long)hw->flash_address,
+	              hw->flash_len >> PAGE_SHIFT);

This changes massively the timing of the flash access. Could this be
the problem on the machine which needs the set_memory_ro patch to
survive ?

quoted text
> I had no luck on friday setting a hardware breakpoint on memory access
> with kgdb to catch the writer with a breakpoint.

Well, why should you get a hardware breakpoint when the _ro protection
does not trigger in the first place ?

Granted there could be a _rw alias mapping, but then the problem must
be still visible with the _ro patch applied.

Thanks,

	tglx

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