[U-Boot] [PATCH] 8313erdb: Set guarded bit on BAT that covers the end of the address space.

[Anton Vorontsov]

On Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 02:49:17PM -0500, Scott Wood wrote:
> Anton Vorontsov wrote:
>> On Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 12:09:31PM -0500, Scott Wood wrote:
>>> This board currently sets DBAT6 to cover all of the final 256MiB of
>>> address space; however, not all of this space is covered by a device.  In
>>> particular, flash sits at 0xfe000000-0xfe7fffff, and nothing is mapped
>>> at the far end of the address space.
>>>
>>> In zlib, there is a loop that references p[-1] if p is non-NULL.  Under
>>> some circumstances, this leads to the CPU speculatively loading from
>>> 0xfffffff8 if p is NULL.  This leads to a machine check.
>>>
>>> Signed-off-by: Scott Wood <scottwood at freescale.com>
>>> ---
>>> Note that there are likely other board with the same issue.
>>
>> Wow, I was actually chasing this (I think) bug for some time.
>>
>> The effect of this bug was quite weird: some kernels didn't
>> boot, and the only difference in the kernel image was.. the build
>> date (i.e. data in linux_banner and init_uts_ns symbols).
>>
>> I suspected the decompression code (what else could it be?), but I
>> didn't manage to track it down to a failing instruction, as the
>> failing kernel was booting *OK* with BDI-2000 attached. Heh.
>>
>> I wonder how you tracked it down to zlib code and a particular
>> loop, please share the technique. ;-)
>
> I changed the kernel's decompression address to 0x1000 so that the  
> exception vectors don't get overwritten,

Ah. That's the key part, and no need for jtag/cop debuggers at all,
which, it appears, pampered me. Neat.

Thanks Scott.

-- 
Anton Vorontsov
email: cbouatmailru at gmail.com
irc://irc.freenode.net/bd2