[Xen-ia64-devel] Good projects for someone

["Magenheimer, Dan (HP Labs Fort Collins)" <dan.magenheimer@xxxxxx>]

Here's a couple of projects that would be useful for
someone to work on:

1) While working on the domU fix earlier in the week, I
discovered that Xen/ia64 still ignores any machine memory
at an address > 4GB (see xen/arch/ia64/linux-xen/efi.c and
search for "hack").  I think nearly all Itanium machines
leave some portion of 1GB-4GB unpopulated so most memory
is getting wasted!  I think CONFIG_VIRTUAL_MEM_MAP needs
to be implemented to fix this.  (Removing the hack causes
a "Not enough memory for frametable" panic.)

2) Turning CONFIG_SMP on doesn't currently work because
the (new) routine flush_tlb_mask is unimplemented and panics.
Once SMP is working again, perhaps we should turn it on
by default?

Also, I still periodically see a problem in dom0 (and I think
the same problem in domU) every few HOURS of execution,
for example only once in 20 Linux compiles.  This problem
manifests as a bad pointer dereference, sometimes zero and
sometimes a random number.  This kills the current process,
usually with a segmentation error.  I suspect that this is
a stale mapping problem, but do not know for sure.

Tracking this down will take a lot of time and some very
detailed instrumentation (printfs or hardware debugger), but
finding and fixing it would be very helpful.

Dan



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