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authorIngo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>2016-07-21 09:53:52 +0200
committerIngo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>2016-07-21 10:11:57 +0200
commitedce21216a8887bf06ba85ee49a00695e44c4341 (patch)
tree79c6f03710dbe0dd983715f727691fcf2950309b /arch/x86/kernel/head32.c
parent4ff5308744f5858e4e49e56a0445e2f8b73e47e0 (diff)
downloadlinux-edce21216a8887bf06ba85ee49a00695e44c4341.tar.gz
x86/boot: Reorganize and clean up the BIOS area reservation code
So the reserve_ebda_region() code has accumulated a number of
problems over the years that make it really difficult to read
and understand:

- The calculation of 'lowmem' and 'ebda_addr' is an unnecessarily
  interleaved mess of first lowmem, then ebda_addr, then lowmem tweaks...

- 'lowmem' here means 'super low mem' - i.e. 16-bit addressable memory. In other
  parts of the x86 code 'lowmem' means 32-bit addressable memory... This makes it
  super confusing to read.

- It does not help at all that we have various memory range markers, half of which
  are 'start of range', half of which are 'end of range' - but this crucial
  property is not obvious in the naming at all ... gave me a headache trying to
  understand all this.

- Also, the 'ebda_addr' name sucks: it highlights that it's an address (which is
  obvious, all values here are addresses!), while it does not highlight that it's
  the _start_ of the EBDA region ...

- 'BIOS_LOWMEM_KILOBYTES' says a lot of things, except that this is the only value
  that is a pointer to a value, not a memory range address!

- The function name itself is a misnomer: it says 'reserve_ebda_region()' while
  its main purpose is to reserve all the firmware ROM typically between 640K and
  1MB, while the 'EBDA' part is only a small part of that ...

- Likewise, the paravirt quirk flag name 'ebda_search' is misleading as well: this
  too should be about whether to reserve firmware areas in the paravirt case.

- In fact thinking about this as 'end of RAM' is confusing: what this function
  *really* wants to reserve is firmware data and code areas! Once the thinking is
  inverted from a mixed 'ram' and 'reserved firmware area' notion to a pure
  'reserved area' notion everything becomes a lot clearer.

To improve all this rewrite the whole code (without changing the logic):

- Firstly invert the naming from 'lowmem end' to 'BIOS reserved area start'
  and propagate this concept through all the variable names and constants.

	BIOS_RAM_SIZE_KB_PTR		// was: BIOS_LOWMEM_KILOBYTES

	BIOS_START_MIN			// was: INSANE_CUTOFF

	ebda_start			// was: ebda_addr
	bios_start			// was: lowmem

	BIOS_START_MAX			// was: LOWMEM_CAP

- Then clean up the name of the function itself by renaming it
  to reserve_bios_regions() and renaming the ::ebda_search paravirt
  flag to ::reserve_bios_regions.

- Fix up all the comments (fix typos), harmonize and simplify their
  formulation and remove comments that become unnecessary due to
  the much better naming all around.

Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
Diffstat (limited to 'arch/x86/kernel/head32.c')
-rw-r--r--arch/x86/kernel/head32.c2
1 files changed, 1 insertions, 1 deletions
diff --git a/arch/x86/kernel/head32.c b/arch/x86/kernel/head32.c
index d784bb547a9d..2dda0bc4576e 100644
--- a/arch/x86/kernel/head32.c
+++ b/arch/x86/kernel/head32.c
@@ -26,7 +26,7 @@ static void __init i386_default_early_setup(void)
 	x86_init.resources.reserve_resources = i386_reserve_resources;
 	x86_init.mpparse.setup_ioapic_ids = setup_ioapic_ids_from_mpc;
 
-	reserve_ebda_region();
+	reserve_bios_regions();
 }
 
 asmlinkage __visible void __init i386_start_kernel(void)