Re: [PATCH] x86: alternative identifier for Phoenix BIOS
- From: Ingo Molnar <mingo@xxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 18 Nov 2008 16:06:59 +0100
* Alan Cox <alan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Sat, 15 Nov 2008 17:55:20 -0800
"H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Philipp Kohlbecher wrote:
My laptop (a Samsung X20) contains a Phoenix BIOS and would benefit from
patch 1e22436eba84edfec9c25e5a25d09062c4f91ca9 (x86: reserve low 64K on
AMI and Phoenix BIOS boxen).
However, according to /sys/class/dmi/id/bios_vendor, the BIOS identifies
its vendor as "Phoenix Technologies LTD" (sans the comma).
Given that AMI and Phoenix combined is something like 80% of the BIOS
market, if not more, it might simply be easier to make it unconditional,
or make it a whitelist instead.
Far more useful would be to make people aware of the problem. If the
BIOS is scribbling in the low 64K of RAM not just BIOS areas, and
doing so outside of ACPI marked areas they need to fix the BIOS
ASAP. If they leave their BIOSes randomly scribbling in operating
system memory areas then as with previous (hardware related) cases
of vendors knowingly shipping corrupting equipment they'll be
building up a huge class action legal liability.
As such making sure the vendor knows in a way they cannot deny is a
very useful activity.
CONFIG_X86_CHECK_BIOS_CORRUPTION=y will do that, it prints:
Corrupted low memory at 0x1000 (4096 phys) = 0x1234
Memory corruption detected in low memory
< stack trace >
if enough distros turn it on (at least in their debug kernels) it
creates the right kind of user pressure.
This debug feature to catch BIOS-generated low-memory corruption is
already upstream.
Ingo
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- From: Philipp Kohlbecher
- Re: [PATCH] x86: alternative identifier for Phoenix BIOS
- From: H. Peter Anvin
- Re: [PATCH] x86: alternative identifier for Phoenix BIOS
- From: Alan Cox
- [PATCH] x86: alternative identifier for Phoenix BIOS
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