kernel news – 15.04.2013

-Linus Torvalds announces kernel 3.9-rc7:

Another week, another -rc.

This is mostly random one-liners, with a few slightly larger driver
fixes. The most interesting (to me, probably to nobody else) fix is a
fix for a rather subtle TLB invalidate bug that only hits 32-bit PAE
due to the weird way that works. Even then it only hits you if you
have some particularly insane mapping patterns, but we *suspect* that
this one might be the cause behind google chrome having triggered bugs
like

chrome: Corrupted page table at address 34a03000
*pdpt = 0000000000000000 *pde = 0000000000000000
Bad pagetable: 000f [#1] PREEMPT SMP

however, the problem is so rare that we haven’t been able to verify
that this really fixes it.

That said, this bug is much more common (and by “much more common” I
mean “still basically impossible to hit unless you were really
unlucky”) on newer machines that have bigger TLB’s and that could
happily have run in 64-bit mode without the disgusting abortion that
is x86 PAE, and a small part of me feels that anybody who hit this
problem on such a machine probably got whatever they deserved.

But if you’ve seen messages like this, and you still run PAE, give the
new -rc a try.

The rest of the fixes are probably more relevant to most people, but
hey, the PAE oen tickles my fancy. Anyway, go out and test regardless
of the PAE issue,

Linus

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