ly
different, as it normally only creates and accesses
dma_alloc_coherent() mappings when the network is brought up, but if
kernel level IP configuration is used this will also occur before any
user space process runs. So the first reproduction of this problem
which we saw was occurred when USB and SATA were removed from the
kernel, and then bring up Ethernet from user space using ifconfig.
I'd like to thank Joseph Bormolini who did the hard work reducing the
problem to this simple to reproduce criteria.

In your case the situation is slightly different, and turns out to
depends on the exact kernel configuration (which we had) and your
ramdisk contents (which we didn't - hence the need for some assumptions).

In this case the problem is a side effect of kernel level module
loading. Kernel subsystems sometimes trigger the load of kernel
modules directly, for example the crypto subsystem tries to load the
cryptomgr and MTD tries to load modules for Flash partitioning if
these are not built into the kernel. This is done by the kernel
creating a user process which runs insmod to try and load the
appropriate module.

In order for this to cause problems the system must be running with a
initrd or initramfs, which contains an insmod executable - if the
kernel can't find an insmod to run, no user process is created, and
the problem doesn't occur.  If an insmod is found, a process is
created to run it, which will inherit the kernel portion of the
swapper_pg_dir first level page table. It doesn't matter whether the
inmod is successful or not, but when the the kernel scheduler context
switches back to the kernel initialisation thread, the insmod's mm is
'borrowed' by the kernel thread, as it doesn't have an address space
of its own. (Reference counting is used to ensure this mm is not
destroyed, even though the user process which caused its creation may no
longer exist.) If this address space doesn't have a first level page
table entry for the consistent mappings, and a driver tries to access
such a mapping, we are in the same situation as described above,
except this time in a kernel thread rather than a user thread
executing inside the kernel.

See bugzilla: 15425, 15836, 15862, 16106, 16793

Signed-off-by: Stuart Menefy <stuart.menefy@st.com>
Signed-off-by: Paul Mundt <lethal@linux-sh.org>
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