[Evolves!] Why does one "stw" fail with address translation disabled in PPC405EP?

[Benjamin Herrenschmidt]

On Mon, 2008-09-01 at 09:22 +0200, Zhou Rui wrote:
> 在 2008-09-01一的 15:42 +1000，Benjamin Herrenschmidt写道：
> > On Sun, 2008-08-31 at 13:50 +0200, Zhou Rui wrote:
> > > Hi, all:
> > >     My problem seems basically solved.
> > >     We we used to call vmalloc() in the memory management part of our
> > > source, but it seems to be the key unreliable point resulting in the
> > > problem. vmalloc() always assigns some virtual addresses whose
> > > corresponding physical addresses are out of memory size (there is only
> > > 32MB DRAM in our 405 board). Once instructions try to access these
> > > illegal physical address, machine check happens
> > 
> > That should -never- happen.
> > 
> > Have you verified, as I asked you a while ago, that you are actually
> > passing the right amount of memory to your kernel from the device-tree
> > or the bootloader ?
> > 
> > Ben.
> 
> I added "mem=32M" to linux command line of the bootloader, and got the
> same machine check.

Paul spotted today that you are actually trying to use __pa() on
addresses returned from vmalloc, that will not work. Those are virtual
addresses in a non-linear mapping, _pa() only works on the linear
mapping.

Ben.