We currently enforce the !RW mapping for the kernel mapping that maps
holes between different text, rodata and data sections. However, kernel
identity mappings will have different RWX permissions to the pages mapping to
text and to the pages padding (which are freed) the text, rodata sections.
Hence kernel identity mappings will be broken to smaller pages. For 64-bit,
kernel text and kernel identity mappings are different, so we can enable
protection checks that come with CONFIG_DEBUG_RODATA, as well as retain 2MB
large page mappings for kernel text.
Konrad reported a boot failure with the Linux Xen paravirt guest because of
this. In this paravirt guest case, the kernel text mapping and the kernel
identity mapping share the same page-table pages. Thus forcing the !RW mapping
for some of the kernel mappings also cause the kernel identity mappings to be
read-only resulting in the boot failure. Linux Xen paravirt guest also
uses 4k mappings and don't use 2M mapping.
Fix this issue and retain large page performance advantage for native kernels
by not working hard and not enforcing !RW for the kernel text mapping,
if the current mapping is already using small page mapping.
Reported-by: Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk <konrad.wilk@oracle.com>
Signed-off-by: Suresh Siddha <suresh.b.siddha@intel.com>
LKML-Reference: <1266522700.2909.34.camel@sbs-t61.sc.intel.com>
Tested-by: Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk <konrad.wilk@oracle.com>
Cc: stable@kernel.org [2.6.32, 2.6.33]
Signed-off-by: H. Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com>
281ff33b7c