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Date: Thu, 15 Jul 2010 09:49:10 -0700
Message-ID: <AANLkTik4mdj3h16CU2GUQAQuG4yeAWFuZsqbPC0ra6Id@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [patch 1/2] x86_64 page fault NMI-safe
From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
To: Mathieu Desnoyers <mathieu.desnoyers@efficios.com>
Cc: LKML <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
        Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>, Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>,
        Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>,
        Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org>,
        Steven Rostedt <rostedt@rostedt.homelinux.com>,
        Frederic Weisbecker <fweisbec@gmail.com>,
        Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>, Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>,
        Li Zefan <lizf@cn.fujitsu.com>, Lai Jiangshan <laijs@cn.fujitsu.com>,
        Johannes Berg <johannes.berg@intel.com>,
        Masami Hiramatsu <masami.hiramatsu.pt@hitachi.com>,
        Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@infradead.org>,
        Tom Zanussi <tzanussi@gmail.com>,
        KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com>,
        Andi Kleen <andi@firstfloor.org>, "H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com>,
        Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@goop.org>,
        "Frank Ch. Eigler" <fche@redhat.com>, Tejun Heo <htejun@gmail.com>
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On Thu, Jul 15, 2010 at 9:44 AM, Mathieu Desnoyers
<mathieu.desnoyers@efficios.com> wrote:
>
> The first thing that strikes me is that we could be interrupted by a standard
> interrupt on top of the iret instruction below.

No, that can never happen.

Why? Simple: regular interrupts aren't ever enabled in eflags. So the
only kinds of traps we can get are NMI's (that don't follow the normal
rules), and exceptions.

Of course, if there is some trap that re-enables interrupts even if
the trap happened in an interrupt-disabled region, then that would
change things, but that would be a bad bug regardless (and totally
independently of any NMI issues). So in that sense it's a "could
happen", but it's something that would be a totally separate bug.

                    Linus
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