So the reserve_ebda_region() code has accumulated a number of
problems over the years that make it really difficult to read
and understand:
- The calculation of 'lowmem' and 'ebda_addr' is an unnecessarily
interleaved mess of first lowmem, then ebda_addr, then lowmem tweaks...
- 'lowmem' here means 'super low mem' - i.e. 16-bit addressable memory. In other
parts of the x86 code 'lowmem' means 32-bit addressable memory... This makes it
super confusing to read.
- It does not help at all that we have various memory range markers, half of which
are 'start of range', half of which are 'end of range' - but this crucial
property is not obvious in the naming at all ... gave me a headache trying to
understand all this.
- Also, the 'ebda_addr' name sucks: it highlights that it's an address (which is
obvious, all values here are addresses!), while it does not highlight that it's
the _start_ of the EBDA region ...
- 'BIOS_LOWMEM_KILOBYTES' says a lot of things, except that this is the only value
that is a pointer to a value, not a memory range address!
- The function name itself is a misnomer: it says 'reserve_ebda_region()' while
its main purpose is to reserve all the firmware ROM typically between 640K and
1MB, while the 'EBDA' part is only a small part of that ...
- Likewise, the paravirt quirk flag name 'ebda_search' is misleading as well: this
too should be about whether to reserve firmware areas in the paravirt case.
- In fact thinking about this as 'end of RAM' is confusing: what this function
*really* wants to reserve is firmware data and code areas! Once the thinking is
inverted from a mixed 'ram' and 'reserved firmware area' notion to a pure
'reserved area' notion everything becomes a lot clearer.
To improve all this rewrite the whole code (without changing the logic):
- Firstly invert the naming from 'lowmem end' to 'BIOS reserved area start'
and propagate this concept through all the variable names and constants.
BIOS_RAM_SIZE_KB_PTR // was: BIOS_LOWMEM_KILOBYTES
BIOS_START_MIN // was: INSANE_CUTOFF
ebda_start // was: ebda_addr
bios_start // was: lowmem
BIOS_START_MAX // was: LOWMEM_CAP
- Then clean up the name of the function itself by renaming it
to reserve_bios_regions() and renaming the ::ebda_search paravirt
flag to ::reserve_bios_regions.
- Fix up all the comments (fix typos), harmonize and simplify their
formulation and remove comments that become unnecessary due to
the much better naming all around.
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
get_bios_ebda_length() uses min_t() without including linux/kernel.h.
This may result in build errors with some configurations. Since the
function is not used anywhere in the kernel, let's just drop it.
Signed-off-by: Guenter Roeck <linux@roeck-us.net>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Mike Waychison <mikew@google.com>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1459558314-5625-1-git-send-email-linux@roeck-us.net
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
Make the comments a bit clearer for get_bios_ebda so that it actually
tells us what it is returning.
Signed-off-by: Mike Waychison <mikew@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@suse.de>
Add a wrapper routine that tells us the length of the EBDA if it is
present. This guy also ensures that the returned length doesn't let the
EBDA run past the 640KiB mark.
Signed-off-by: Mike Waychison <mikew@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@suse.de>
Change header guards named "ASM_X86__*" to "_ASM_X86_*" since:
a. the double underscore is ugly and pointless.
b. no leading underscore violates namespace constraints.
Signed-off-by: H. Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com>
