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Date:      Sat, 06 Dec 2014 10:54:19 -0700
From:      Ian Lepore <ian@FreeBSD.org>
To:        draymond@FoxValley.net
Cc:        freebsd-arm@freebsd.org
Subject:   re: new support for Raspberry Pi B+
Message-ID:  <1417888459.1064.109.camel@revolution.hippie.lan>
In-Reply-To: <20141202162852.w97gp1gmpkw004kw@webmail.FoxValley.net>
References:  <20141202162852.w97gp1gmpkw004kw@webmail.FoxValley.net>

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On Tue, 2014-12-02 at 16:28 -0600, draymond@FoxValley.net wrote:
> > It seems that "portsnap fetch update" is a consistent way to  
> > generate  a panic.  I have now seen panics with all four of my SD  
> > cards on two  different Raspberry Pis, and with three different  
> > power cables.  All  occurred while running at low speed for SD  
> > (25MHz) on r274416.
> >
> > ...
> >
> > Ian, you mentioned that you thought this looked like a memory   
> > corruption similar to the issues reported on Wandboard.  I have been  
> >  reading those threads but I don't fully understand what is the  
> > issue.   Can you clarify?  I also saw some discussion about some new  
> > changes  currently under testing and planned for release.  Are these  
> > expected  to resolve the memory corruption?  What is the root cause  
> > and is the  problem present in all builds or just recent builds?
> 
> Ian, can you comment?

The current pmap code (low-level virtual memory implementation) for
armv6 is less than perfect.  We fixed a bunch of bugs earlier this year,
but given the problems people are seeing when pushing heavy workloads on
multicore systems, it appears we didn't fix all of them.  I have no real
evidence, just a gut feeling, that some of the problems we see on
single-core systems are also related to the pmap implementation.

Svata and Michal have a completely separate pmap implementation they
wrote for their $work a couple years ago (before we even had armv6
support in freebsd -- they were way ahead of us).  We're testing it now
with the goal of replacing the current code with the new code sometime
soon.  While Svata and Michal have been using and testing this code for
a long time, they've done it on a couple specific systems and with an
older freebsd code base.  Now we need wider testing.  There may be a bug
or two to work out in the new code, and even more likely, the new code
may help expose existing bugs in other parts of arm-freebsd that we'll
need to fix along the way.

-- Ian





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