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Re: [Xen-devel] Drivers



> Related to this, I wrote a little script that disassembles the kernel
> and drivers, looking for privileged instructions.  (The BUG macro must
> first be modified to avoid many false positives, however.) 

That's certainly a useful exercise. 
  
> It turned up a problem in the file
> linux-2.6.8.1/drivers/mtd/maps/nettel.c.  I've attached a patch -- can
> we put this in the patches directory? 

Definitely -- remind me if it doesn't appear soon.

> I also noticed a number of scary things in the kernel itself (moves
> to/from CR4, various CLI/STI pairs, maybe some others but I forget ATM)
> but it appears that these are avoided at runtime.  Some of these could
> and probably should be cleaned up, though, since they exist in the
> arch/xen tree.  I'll come back with some more details on this. 

Because of the 'minimum changes' approach we've taken to the 2.6
port there's a certain amount of code that's compiled in but
never used. Hopefully these instructions will be on those paths,
but it would be nice to have a list of them to verify.
If/when we're in the mainstream kernel tree we can take a more
aggressive approach about cleaning things up.

Ian


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