Re: [Xen-devel] [Ques]:xen_ident_map_ISA ant it's mfns...

[Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk <konrad@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Jan 20, 2012 at 05:29:32PM -0800, Mukesh Rathor wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I am bit confused about the do_update_va_mapping call that dom0 makes in
> xen_ident_map_ISA() to map ffff8800000a0000 to mfn a0. The mfn belongs
> to DOMID_IO. Before the mfn is mapped, the l1 entry is not empty:
> 
> 0000000139d08500:  00100001380a0027
> 
> After the mapping:
> 
> 0000000139d08500:  00100000000a0467  as expected.
> 
> However, the mfn 1380a0 still seems to belong to dom0. Shouldn't that
> have been returned back to the xen heap? 

It should if dom0 had returned it back. The setup.c code you where
it returns the swatches of memory has a check where it decides to return
only memory above 1M. The <1MB is left unused.

In other words, we make all the PTE's to the look as if PFN are
1:1 to MFN. But if you do a MFN lookup to PFN (mfn_to_pfn) for the regions below
1MB, you end up getting PFNs that are _not_ in the 1MB region.
Instead they are just normal memory.

There is a good reason for this, which if I remeber right is to allow
fixmap to work correctly, but if you are using ioremap it would return
empty RAM so that most of the PnP devices (like RTC) would not load.

hmm, I think so . I remember thinking to remove that once (so allow the
<1MB region to be freed), and I hit some pretty big problems.

Is there a particular reason you want to "Free" that memory?

> 
> thanks,
> Mukesh
> 
> 
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