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-rw-r--r--Documentation/x86/early-microcode.txt25
-rw-r--r--Documentation/x86/exception-tables.txt35
-rw-r--r--Documentation/x86/x86_64/boot-options.txt2
3 files changed, 62 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/x86/early-microcode.txt b/Documentation/x86/early-microcode.txt
index d62bea6796da..c956d99cf1de 100644
--- a/Documentation/x86/early-microcode.txt
+++ b/Documentation/x86/early-microcode.txt
@@ -40,3 +40,28 @@ cp ../microcode.bin kernel/x86/microcode/GenuineIntel.bin (or AuthenticAMD.bin)
find . | cpio -o -H newc >../ucode.cpio
cd ..
cat ucode.cpio /boot/initrd-3.5.0.img >/boot/initrd-3.5.0.ucode.img
+
+Builtin microcode
+=================
+
+We can also load builtin microcode supplied through the regular firmware
+builtin method CONFIG_FIRMWARE_IN_KERNEL. Here's an example:
+
+CONFIG_FIRMWARE_IN_KERNEL=y
+CONFIG_EXTRA_FIRMWARE="intel-ucode/06-3a-09 amd-ucode/microcode_amd_fam15h.bin"
+CONFIG_EXTRA_FIRMWARE_DIR="/lib/firmware"
+
+This basically means, you have the following tree structure locally:
+
+/lib/firmware/
+|-- amd-ucode
+...
+| |-- microcode_amd_fam15h.bin
+...
+|-- intel-ucode
+...
+| |-- 06-3a-09
+...
+
+so that the build system can find those files and integrate them into
+the final kernel image. The early loader finds them and applies them.
diff --git a/Documentation/x86/exception-tables.txt b/Documentation/x86/exception-tables.txt
index 32901aa36f0a..e396bcd8d830 100644
--- a/Documentation/x86/exception-tables.txt
+++ b/Documentation/x86/exception-tables.txt
@@ -290,3 +290,38 @@ Due to the way that the exception table is built and needs to be ordered,
only use exceptions for code in the .text section. Any other section
will cause the exception table to not be sorted correctly, and the
exceptions will fail.
+
+Things changed when 64-bit support was added to x86 Linux. Rather than
+double the size of the exception table by expanding the two entries
+from 32-bits to 64 bits, a clever trick was used to store addresses
+as relative offsets from the table itself. The assembly code changed
+from:
+ .long 1b,3b
+to:
+ .long (from) - .
+ .long (to) - .
+
+and the C-code that uses these values converts back to absolute addresses
+like this:
+
+ ex_insn_addr(const struct exception_table_entry *x)
+ {
+ return (unsigned long)&x->insn + x->insn;
+ }
+
+In v4.6 the exception table entry was expanded with a new field "handler".
+This is also 32-bits wide and contains a third relative function
+pointer which points to one of:
+
+1) int ex_handler_default(const struct exception_table_entry *fixup)
+ This is legacy case that just jumps to the fixup code
+2) int ex_handler_fault(const struct exception_table_entry *fixup)
+ This case provides the fault number of the trap that occurred at
+ entry->insn. It is used to distinguish page faults from machine
+ check.
+3) int ex_handler_ext(const struct exception_table_entry *fixup)
+ This case is used for uaccess_err ... we need to set a flag
+ in the task structure. Before the handler functions existed this
+ case was handled by adding a large offset to the fixup to tag
+ it as special.
+More functions can easily be added.
diff --git a/Documentation/x86/x86_64/boot-options.txt b/Documentation/x86/x86_64/boot-options.txt
index 68ed3114c363..0965a71f9942 100644
--- a/Documentation/x86/x86_64/boot-options.txt
+++ b/Documentation/x86/x86_64/boot-options.txt
@@ -60,6 +60,8 @@ Machine check
threshold to 1. Enabling this may make memory predictive failure
analysis less effective if the bios sets thresholds for memory
errors since we will not see details for all errors.
+ mce=recovery
+ Force-enable recoverable machine check code paths
nomce (for compatibility with i386): same as mce=off