x86, 32-bit: trim memory not covered by wb mtrrs
On some machines, buggy BIOSes don't properly setup WB MTRRs to cover all
available RAM, meaning the last few megs (or even gigs) of memory will be
marked uncached. Since Linux tends to allocate from high memory addresses
first, this causes the machine to be unusably slow as soon as the kernel
starts really using memory (i.e. right around init time).
This patch works around the problem by scanning the MTRRs at boot and
figuring out whether the current end_pfn value (setup by early e820 code)
goes beyond the highest WB MTRR range, and if so, trimming it to match. A
fairly obnoxious KERN_WARNING is printed too, letting the user know that
not all of their memory is available due to a likely BIOS bug.
Something similar could be done on i386 if needed, but the boot ordering
would be slightly different, since the MTRR code on i386 depends on the
boot_cpu_data structure being setup.
This patch fixes a bug in the last patch that caused the code to run on
non-Intel machines (AMD machines apparently don't need it and it's untested
on other non-Intel machines, so best keep it off).
Further enhancements and fixes from:
Yinghai Lu <Yinghai.Lu@Sun.COM>
Andi Kleen <ak@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Jesse Barnes <jesse.barnes@intel.com>
Tested-by: Justin Piszcz <jpiszcz@lucidpixels.com>
Cc: Andi Kleen <andi@firstfloor.org>
Cc: "Eric W. Biederman" <ebiederm@xmission.com>
Cc: Yinghai Lu <yhlu.kernel@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
diff --git a/Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt b/Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt
index 860a908..b8fadf5 100644
--- a/Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt
+++ b/Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt
@@ -570,6 +570,12 @@
See drivers/char/README.epca and
Documentation/digiepca.txt.
+ disable_mtrr_trim [X86-64, Intel only]
+ By default the kernel will trim any uncacheable
+ memory out of your available memory pool based on
+ MTRR settings. This parameter disables that behavior,
+ possibly causing your machine to run very slowly.
+
dmasound= [HW,OSS] Sound subsystem buffers
dscc4.setup= [NET]