Re: [Xen-devel] issues getting more than 16M ram to be used without oopsing. 1.2 and 1.3-unstable

[Keir Fraser <Keir.Fraser@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> 
> > Heh, I know what you mean on the VIA boards. I almost always have an issue
> > booting > 3 month old kernels on them. 8-P I spose I could look at via as
> > a "enforced upgrade" system. ;)
> > 
> > *nod* I'd tried the noacpi, ignorebiostables, etc. All of the usual tricks
> > on the xenolinux.gz kernel image as well to no avail pror to harassing
> > yall. :) I think my friend Adam was feeling a bit abused as a Xen suport
> > route as well. *grin*
> > 
> > Things are getting a LITTLE bit futher on the bootup. :) Any chance the
> > IDE , USB, and/or ethernet interfaces are doign something funky?
> 
> Looks like the Ethernet interface might be doing bad things. Both
> crashes are at the same point in its interrupt handler. I'm not sure
> whether this is a cause or merely a symptom though.
> 
> I'll take a look. Meanwhile, can you put a different card in that
> machine? For example, we know that 3com 3c905's are good. 3c595 is a
> relic. :-)

Okay, I think I've found and fixed the problem. I've made pre-built
images available at:
 http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~kaf24/xen.gz
 http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~kaf24/xenolinux.gz

The problem is that the 3c595 is not using DMA, but is instead using
PIO (polled I/O). This is doubly bad in Xen:
 1. The main CPU is responsibel for transferring all data to/from slow
 on-card memory.
 2. Xen needs to temporarily map the buffer into its address space to
 execute the transfer.

It was the latter which was not being done -- Xen has a one-to-one
mapping of onyl the first 40MB of physical memory. If the buffer
location is any higher than that then we ended up copying received
packets to a random location!

So, if you're looking for decent performance then you want to get
yourself a good network card -- eg. 3c905.

I've checked the probable fix into both 1.2 and 1.3 trees.

 -- Keir


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