gd: an uncached mapping of the .idmap.text ELF section. The idmap is generally used when enabling and disabling the MMU, which includes early CPU boot. In this case, the secondary CPU switches to swapper as soon as it enters C code: struct mm_struct *mm = &init_mm; unsigned int cpu = smp_processor_id(); /* * All kernel threads share the same mm context; grab a * reference and switch to it. */ atomic_inc(&mm->mm_count); current->active_mm = mm; cpumask_set_cpu(cpu, mm_cpumask(mm)); cpu_switch_mm(mm->pgd, mm); This causes a problem on ARMv7, where the identity mapping is treated as strongly-ordered leading to architecturally UNPREDICTABLE behaviour of exclusive accesses, such as those used by atomic_inc. This patch re-orders the secondary_start_kernel function so that we switch to swapper before performing any exclusive accesses. Cc: Cc: David McKay Reported-by: Gilles Chanteperdrix Signed-off-by: Will Deacon Signed-off-by: Russell King