This patch provides an enhancement to kexec/kdump. It implements the
following features:
- Backup/restore memory used by the original kernel before/after
kexec.
- Save/restore CPU state before/after kexec.
The features of this patch can be used as a general method to call program in
physical mode (paging turning off). This can be used to call BIOS code under
Linux.
kexec-tools needs to be patched to support kexec jump. The patches and
the precompiled kexec can be download from the following URL:
6. Call physical mode executable with following shell command line:
/sbin/kexec -e
Implementation point:
To support jumping without reserving memory. One shadow backup page (source
page) is allocated for each page used by kexeced code image (destination
page). When do kexec_load, the image of kexeced code is loaded into source
pages, and before executing, the destination pages and the source pages are
swapped, so the contents of destination pages are backupped. Before jumping
to the kexeced code image and after jumping back to the original kernel, the
destination pages and the source pages are swapped too.
C ABI (calling convention) is used as communication protocol between
kernel and called code.
A flag named KEXEC_PRESERVE_CONTEXT for sys_kexec_load is added to
indicate that the loaded kernel image is used for jumping back.
Now, only the i386 architecture is supported.
Signed-off-by: Huang Ying <ying.huang@intel.com> Acked-by: Vivek Goyal <vgoyal@redhat.com> Cc: "Eric W. Biederman" <ebiederm@xmission.com> Cc: Pavel Machek <pavel@ucw.cz> Cc: Nigel Cunningham <nigel@nigel.suspend2.net> Cc: "Rafael J. Wysocki" <rjw@sisk.pl> Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu> Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>