APM BIOSes have many bugs regarding proper representation of the appropriate
segment limits for calling the BIOS. By default, APM_RELAX_SEGMENTS is always
turned on to support running the APM BIOS on these buggy machines. Keeping
64k limits poses very little danger to the kernel, because the pages where the
APM BIOS is located will always be in low physical memory BIOS areas, which
should already be marked reserved, and only buggy BIOSes would possibly
overstep the segment bounds with writes to data anyway.
Since forcing stricter limits breaks many machines and is not default
behavior, it seems reasonable to deprecate the older code which may cause APM
BIOS to fault.
If you really have a badly enough broken APM BIOS that you have to turn off
APM_RELAX_SEGMENTS, seems like the best recourse here would be to disable the
APM BIOS and / or not compile it into your kernel to begin with, and / or add
your system to the known bad list.
The reason I want to deprecate this code is there is underlying brokenness
with the set_limit macros, and getting rid of many of the call sites rather
than rewriting them seems to be the simplest and most correct course of
action.
Signed-off-by: Zachary Amsden <zach@vmware.com>
Acked-by: "Seth, Rohit" <rohit.seth@intel.com>
Cc: Stephen Rothwell <sfr@canb.auug.org.au>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
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