mm: the loader jumped out from under itself, and 3 GB was never the limit

Three things, and the first one is the freeze.

**The loader jumped out from under itself.** A machine with a lot of RAM
stopped at "Starting the kernel" with the splash still up: no panic, no reset,
nothing. The firmware's own exception handler had the answer the whole time,
once a machine was found that printed it:

    X64 Exception Type - 0E(#PF - Page-Fault)
    ExceptionData - 0x10   I:1 P:0
    RIP - 0000000140004DEE      <- the loader's own code, at 5.4 GB
    RAX - 0000000000001000      <- the page tables it had just installed
    RCX - 00000000001000F0      <- the kernel it was about to jump to

I:1 P:0 is an instruction fetch from a page that is not present. The loader
built page tables covering four gigabytes, loaded cr3 -- and the firmware had
placed the loader image *above* four gigabytes, so the next instruction fetch
was unmapped. It reproduces exactly on `-m 8G` and never on `-m 1G`, which is
why every test here passed.

The PDPT is one page whether four entries are filled or all 512, so all 512
are: 512 GB of identity map, replaced by kvmalloc() a few hundred instructions
later.

**And 3 GB was never the limit, it was a circle.** PHYSTOP_MAX was 0xC0000000
because kvmalloc() mapped exactly four 1 GB pages, and kvmalloc mapped four
because that was the cap -- each holding the other up, throwing away thirteen
gigabytes of a sixteen gigabyte machine. kvmalloc now maps as many gigabytes as
the machine has RAM and tells ioremap where the direct map stopped, instead of
ioremap assuming it stopped at four.

Freeing memory becomes two passes, and the ordering is forced rather than
chosen: kinit1() runs *before* kvmalloc because kvmalloc calls kalloc for its
own page tables, and freeing a page means writing into it -- so kinit1 can only
touch what the loader mapped. kinit_high() adds the rest afterwards.
`phystop` and the new `lowtop` are now two different numbers: the DMA arena
stays below 4 GB because a device is not obliged to reach the top of memory,
and an RTL8139's buffer address register is thirty-two bits wide.

**And the 0 MB.** The System Information screen reported "0 MB usable" on a
machine with sixteen gigabytes in it, because memory_mb() had its own 16 KB
guess at how big a memory map gets, and returned zero when GetMemoryMap said
EFI_BUFFER_TOO_SMALL. That is the same bug as the previous commit's, in a
second copy, and this one failed silently. There is one buffer and one
map_read() now.

Verified at 1 GB, 8 GB and 16 GB: all three boot, no traps, no panics, socktest
and memfdtest green in each. 8 GB and 16 GB did not boot at all before -- and
16 GB now reports 17408 MB with "mem: 13312 MB above 4 GB added to the
allocator", where the old kernel would have used three. Both display
configurations still clean.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
This commit is contained in:
Nexoniarz 2026-09-25 15:23:38 +02:00
commit 3b26575b4a
9 changed files with 246 additions and 55 deletions

12
.gitignore vendored
View file

@ -54,3 +54,15 @@ docs/Website/releases/
# remembering.
core
core.*
# Reference material: somebody else's source tree, read and never shipped.
#
# help/ is where a third-party kernel gets cloned when it is worth reading --
# Zircon, at the time of writing. It is BSD-licensed and this project is
# Apache-2.0, so the licences are compatible and that is *not* the reason it is
# ignored: it is ignored because a copy of another project's source inside this
# one is a copy that will rot, that nobody will update, and that makes the
# provenance of every file around it a question. Clone it, read it, learn the
# facts, write our own expression -- the rule docs/architecture/ldls.md section
# 3 already states for Linux drivers.
help/