[SeaBIOS] varlow/extrastack vs code

[Dr. David Alan Gilbert]

* Laszlo Ersek (lersek at redhat.com) wrote:
> On 01/23/17 16:49, Kevin O'Connor wrote:
> > On Mon, Jan 23, 2017 at 11:11:02AM +0100, Laszlo Ersek wrote:
> >> On 01/20/17 20:39, Dr. David Alan Gilbert wrote:
> >>> * Kevin O'Connor (kevin at koconnor.net) wrote:
> >>>> On Fri, Jan 20, 2017 at 06:40:44PM +0000, Dr. David Alan Gilbert wrote:
> >>>>> Hi,
> >>>>>   I turned the debug level up to 4 on our smaller (128k) ROM downstream
> >>>>> build and seem to have hit a case where it's been layed out so that the
> >>>>> 'ExtraStack' is at the same location as some code (display_uuid) which
> >>>>> was causing some very random behaviour;
> > [...]
> >> Would this be consistent with a stack overflow?
> >>
> >> See commit 46b82624c95b951e8825fab117d9352faeae0ec8. Perhaps
> >> BUILD_EXTRA_STACK_SIZE (2KB) is too small now?
> > 
> > The ExtraStack isn't used at the point Dave reports the problem -
> > display_uuid() is part of the init phase and that happens on the main
> > "post" stack.
> > 
> > [...]
> >> (This is based off 1.9.1)
> > 
> > I missed that earlier - there were some important fixes post 1.9.1 wrt
> > reboots.  Commits b837e68d / a48f602c2 could explain the issue.  I'd
> > make sure the issue is still present on the latest version.
> 
> That's a very promising hunch -- b837e68d explicitly mentions "reboot
> loop" in the subject. It seems that Dave didn't mention any RHBZ numbers
> in his email, but we have two somewhat similar bug reports (which I hope
> share a root cause) and the second report triggers the issue with a
> reboot loop specifically.
> 
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1411275
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1382906
> 
> (Apologies that the 2nd RHBZ is not public; it's currently filed for the
> RH kernel, and those BZs default to private. :/)
> 
> CC'ing DavidH too, for RHBZ#1382906.

Yeh, it's looking promising; I've done a build with low debug that
survived for 50+ reboots and turned my debug on and it's going for 20 so far,
so that's pretty good.

However, reading the commits I'm a little confused.

I don't seem to have hit any cases where it's taken the shutdown case after
failing to reboot; so it's not that path.

My reboots in this case are always guest triggered, so they're not very
early reboots.

One comment in there is:
   +        // Some old versions of KVM don't store a pristine copy of the
   +        // BIOS in high memory.  Try to shutdown the machine instead.

do you have a definition of 'old';  in this case it's a new-ish qemu
on our downstream (older) kernel but it's got fairly new kvm bits in,
but the qemu is configured in our rhel6 compatibility mode - so hmm.

Dave

(With any luck this post will act as a jinx to wake up any sleeping
bugs that make me think it's OK....)
> Thank you!
> Laszlo
> 
--
Dr. David Alan Gilbert / dgilbert at redhat.com / Manchester, UK