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2012-08-01mm: migration: clean up unmap_and_move()Minchan Kim
commit 0dabec93de633a87adfbbe1d800a4c56cd19d73b upstream. Stable note: Not tracked in Bugzilla. This patch makes later patches easier to apply but has no other impact. unmap_and_move() is one a big messy function. Clean it up. Signed-off-by: Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@gmail.com> Reviewed-by: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com> Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org> Cc: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com> Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de> Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com> Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.cz> Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de> Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
2012-08-01mm: zone_reclaim: make isolate_lru_page() filter-awareMinchan Kim
commit f80c0673610e36ae29d63e3297175e22f70dde5f upstream. Stable note: Not tracked in Bugzilla. THP and compaction disrupt the LRU list leading to poor reclaim decisions which has a variable performance impact. In __zone_reclaim case, we don't want to shrink mapped page. Nonetheless, we have isolated mapped page and re-add it into LRU's head. It's unnecessary CPU overhead and makes LRU churning. Of course, when we isolate the page, the page might be mapped but when we try to migrate the page, the page would be not mapped. So it could be migrated. But race is rare and although it happens, it's no big deal. Signed-off-by: Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@gmail.com> Acked-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org> Reviewed-by: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com> Reviewed-by: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com> Reviewed-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.cz> Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de> Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com> Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de> Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
2012-08-01mm: compaction: make isolate_lru_page() filter-awareMinchan Kim
commit 39deaf8585152f1a35c1676d3d7dc6ae0fb65967 upstream. Stable note: Not tracked in Bugzilla. THP and compaction disrupt the LRU list leading to poor reclaim decisions which has a variable performance impact. In async mode, compaction doesn't migrate dirty or writeback pages. So, it's meaningless to pick the page and re-add it to lru list. Of course, when we isolate the page in compaction, the page might be dirty or writeback but when we try to migrate the page, the page would be not dirty, writeback. So it could be migrated. But it's very unlikely as isolate and migration cycle is much faster than writeout. So, this patch helps cpu overhead and prevent unnecessary LRU churning. Signed-off-by: Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@gmail.com> Acked-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org> Reviewed-by: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com> Reviewed-by: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com> Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de> Acked-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com> Reviewed-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.cz> Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de> Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
2012-08-01mm: change isolate mode from #define to bitwise typeMinchan Kim
commit 4356f21d09283dc6d39a6f7287a65ddab61e2808 upstream. Stable note: Not tracked in Bugzilla. This patch makes later patches easier to apply but has no other impact. Change ISOLATE_XXX macro with bitwise isolate_mode_t type. Normally, macro isn't recommended as it's type-unsafe and making debugging harder as symbol cannot be passed throught to the debugger. Quote from Johannes " Hmm, it would probably be cleaner to fully convert the isolation mode into independent flags. INACTIVE, ACTIVE, BOTH is currently a tri-state among flags, which is a bit ugly." This patch moves isolate mode from swap.h to mmzone.h by memcontrol.h Signed-off-by: Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@gmail.com> Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org> Cc: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com> Cc: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com> Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de> Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com> Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.cz> Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de> Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
2012-08-01mm: compaction: trivial clean up in acct_isolated()Minchan Kim
commit b9e84ac1536d35aee03b2601f19694949f0bd506 upstream. Stable note: Not tracked in Bugzilla. This patch makes later patches easier to apply but has no other impact. acct_isolated of compaction uses page_lru_base_type which returns only base type of LRU list so it never returns LRU_ACTIVE_ANON or LRU_ACTIVE_FILE. In addtion, cc->nr_[anon|file] is used in only acct_isolated so it doesn't have fields in conpact_control. This patch removes fields from compact_control and makes clear function of acct_issolated which counts the number of anon|file pages isolated. Signed-off-by: Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@gmail.com> Acked-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org> Reviewed-by: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com> Reviewed-by: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com> Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de> Acked-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com> Reviewed-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.cz> Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de> Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
2012-08-01vmscan: abort reclaim/compaction if compaction can proceedMel Gorman
commit e0c23279c9f800c403f37511484d9014ac83adec upstream. Stable note: Not tracked on Bugzilla. THP and compaction was found to aggressively reclaim pages and stall systems under different situations that was addressed piecemeal over time. If compaction can proceed, shrink_zones() stops doing any work but its callers still call shrink_slab() which raises the priority and potentially sleeps. This is unnecessary and wasteful so this patch aborts direct reclaim/compaction entirely if compaction can proceed. Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de> Acked-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com> Reviewed-by: Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@gmail.com> Acked-by: Johannes Weiner <jweiner@redhat.com> Cc: Josh Boyer <jwboyer@redhat.com> Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de> Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
2012-08-01vmscan: limit direct reclaim for higher order allocationsRik van Riel
commit e0887c19b2daa140f20ca8104bdc5740f39dbb86 upstream. Stable note: Not tracked on Bugzilla. THP and compaction was found to aggressively reclaim pages and stall systems under different situations that was addressed piecemeal over time. Paragraph 3 of this changelog is the motivation for this patch. When suffering from memory fragmentation due to unfreeable pages, THP page faults will repeatedly try to compact memory. Due to the unfreeable pages, compaction fails. Needless to say, at that point page reclaim also fails to create free contiguous 2MB areas. However, that doesn't stop the current code from trying, over and over again, and freeing a minimum of 4MB (2UL << sc->order pages) at every single invocation. This resulted in my 12GB system having 2-3GB free memory, a corresponding amount of used swap and very sluggish response times. This can be avoided by having the direct reclaim code not reclaim from zones that already have plenty of free memory available for compaction. If compaction still fails due to unmovable memory, doing additional reclaim will only hurt the system, not help. [jweiner@redhat.com: change comment to explain the order check] Signed-off-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com> Acked-by: Johannes Weiner <jweiner@redhat.com> Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de> Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com> Reviewed-by: Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner <jweiner@redhat.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de> Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
2012-08-01vmscan: reduce wind up shrinker->nr when shrinker can't do workDave Chinner
commit 3567b59aa80ac4417002bf58e35dce5c777d4164 upstream. Stable note: Not tracked in Bugzilla. This patch reduces excessive reclaim of slab objects reducing the amount of information that has to be brought back in from disk. The third and fourth paragram in the series describes the impact. When a shrinker returns -1 to shrink_slab() to indicate it cannot do any work given the current memory reclaim requirements, it adds the entire total_scan count to shrinker->nr. The idea ehind this is that whenteh shrinker is next called and can do work, it will do the work of the previously aborted shrinker call as well. However, if a filesystem is doing lots of allocation with GFP_NOFS set, then we get many, many more aborts from the shrinkers than we do successful calls. The result is that shrinker->nr winds up to it's maximum permissible value (twice the current cache size) and then when the next shrinker call that can do work is issued, it has enough scan count built up to free the entire cache twice over. This manifests itself in the cache going from full to empty in a matter of seconds, even when only a small part of the cache is needed to be emptied to free sufficient memory. Under metadata intensive workloads on ext4 and XFS, I'm seeing the VFS caches increase memory consumption up to 75% of memory (no page cache pressure) over a period of 30-60s, and then the shrinker empties them down to zero in the space of 2-3s. This cycle repeats over and over again, with the shrinker completely trashing the inode and dentry caches every minute or so the workload continues. This behaviour was made obvious by the shrink_slab tracepoints added earlier in the series, and made worse by the patch that corrected the concurrent accounting of shrinker->nr. To avoid this problem, stop repeated small increments of the total scan value from winding shrinker->nr up to a value that can cause the entire cache to be freed. We still need to allow it to wind up, so use the delta as the "large scan" threshold check - if the delta is more than a quarter of the entire cache size, then it is a large scan and allowed to cause lots of windup because we are clearly needing to free lots of memory. If it isn't a large scan then limit the total scan to half the size of the cache so that windup never increases to consume the whole cache. Reducing the total scan limit further does not allow enough wind-up to maintain the current levels of performance, whilst a higher threshold does not prevent the windup from freeing the entire cache under sustained workloads. Signed-off-by: Dave Chinner <dchinner@redhat.com> Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk> Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de> Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
2012-08-01vmscan: shrinker->nr updates race and go wrongDave Chinner
commit acf92b485cccf028177f46918e045c0c4e80ee10 upstream. Stable note: Not tracked in Bugzilla. This patch reduces excessive reclaim of slab objects reducing the amount of information that has to be brought back in from disk. shrink_slab() allows shrinkers to be called in parallel so the struct shrinker can be updated concurrently. It does not provide any exclusio for such updates, so we can get the shrinker->nr value increasing or decreasing incorrectly. As a result, when a shrinker repeatedly returns a value of -1 (e.g. a VFS shrinker called w/ GFP_NOFS), the shrinker->nr goes haywire, sometimes updating with the scan count that wasn't used, sometimes losing it altogether. Worse is when a shrinker does work and that update is lost due to racy updates, which means the shrinker will do the work again! Fix this by making the total_scan calculations independent of shrinker->nr, and making the shrinker->nr updates atomic w.r.t. to other updates via cmpxchg loops. Signed-off-by: Dave Chinner <dchinner@redhat.com> Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk> Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de> Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
2012-08-01vmscan: add shrink_slab tracepointsDave Chinner
commit 095760730c1047c69159ce88021a7fa3833502c8 upstream. Stable note: This patch makes later patches easier to apply but otherwise has little to justify it. It is a diagnostic patch that was part of a series addressing excessive slab shrinking after GFP_NOFS failures. There is detailed information on the series' motivation at https://lkml.org/lkml/2011/6/2/42 . It is impossible to understand what the shrinkers are actually doing without instrumenting the code, so add a some tracepoints to allow insight to be gained. Signed-off-by: Dave Chinner <dchinner@redhat.com> Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk> Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
2012-08-01vmscan: clear ZONE_CONGESTED for zone with good watermarkShaohua Li
commit 439423f6894aa0dec22187526827456f5004baed upstream. Stable note: Not tracked in Bugzilla. kswapd is responsible for clearing ZONE_CONGESTED after it balances a zone and this patch fixes a bug where that was failing to happen. Without this patch, processes can stall in wait_iff_congested unnecessarily. For users, this can look like an interactivity stall but some workloads would see it as sudden drop in throughput. ZONE_CONGESTED is only cleared in kswapd, but pages can be freed in any task. It's possible ZONE_CONGESTED isn't cleared in some cases: 1. the zone is already balanced just entering balance_pgdat() for order-0 because concurrent tasks free memory. In this case, later check will skip the zone as it's balanced so the flag isn't cleared. 2. high order balance fallbacks to order-0. quote from Mel: At the end of balance_pgdat(), kswapd uses the following logic; If reclaiming at high order { for each zone { if all_unreclaimable skip if watermark is not met order = 0 loop again /* watermark is met */ clear congested } } i.e. it clears ZONE_CONGESTED if it the zone is balanced. if not, it restarts balancing at order-0. However, if the higher zones are balanced for order-0, kswapd will miss clearing ZONE_CONGESTED as that only happens after a zone is shrunk. This can mean that wait_iff_congested() stalls unnecessarily. This patch makes kswapd clear ZONE_CONGESTED during its initial highmem->dma scan for zones that are already balanced. Signed-off-by: Shaohua Li <shaohua.li@intel.com> Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de> Reviewed-by: Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de> Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
2012-08-01mm: vmscan: fix force-scanning small targets without swapJohannes Weiner
commit a4d3e9e76337059406fcf3ead288c0df22a790e9 upstream. Stable note: Not tracked in Bugzilla. This patch augments an earlier commit that avoids scanning priority being artificially raised. The older fix was particularly important for small memcgs to avoid calling wait_iff_congested() unnecessarily. Without swap, anonymous pages are not scanned. As such, they should not count when considering force-scanning a small target if there is no swap. Otherwise, targets are not force-scanned even when their effective scan number is zero and the other conditions--kswapd/memcg--apply. This fixes 246e87a93934 ("memcg: fix get_scan_count() for small targets"). [akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix comment] Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner <jweiner@redhat.com> Acked-by: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com> Reviewed-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.cz> Cc: Ying Han <yinghan@google.com> Cc: Balbir Singh <bsingharora@gmail.com> Cc: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com> Cc: Daisuke Nishimura <nishimura@mxp.nes.nec.co.jp> Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de> Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
2012-08-01mm: reduce the amount of work done when updating min_free_kbytesMel Gorman
commit 938929f14cb595f43cd1a4e63e22d36cab1e4a1f upstream. Stable note: Fixes https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=726210 . Large machines with 1TB or more of RAM take a long time to boot without this patch and may spew out soft lockup warnings. When min_free_kbytes is updated, some pageblocks are marked MIGRATE_RESERVE. Ordinarily, this work is unnoticable as it happens early in boot but on large machines with 1TB of memory, this has been reported to delay boot times, probably due to the NUMA distances involved. The bulk of the work is due to calling calling pageblock_is_reserved() an unnecessary amount of times and accessing far more struct page metadata than is necessary. This patch significantly reduces the amount of work done by setup_zone_migrate_reserve() improving boot times on 1TB machines. [akpm@linux-foundation.org: coding-style fixes] Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de> Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
2012-08-01mm/vmstat.c: cache align vm_statDimitri Sivanich
commit a1cb2c60ddc98ff4e5246f410558805401ceee67 upstream. Stable note: Not tracked on Bugzilla. This patch is known to make a big difference to tmpfs performance on larger machines. This was found to adversely affect tmpfs I/O performance. Tests run on a 640 cpu UV system. With 120 threads doing parallel writes, each to different tmpfs mounts: No patch: ~300 MB/sec With vm_stat alignment: ~430 MB/sec Signed-off-by: Dimitri Sivanich <sivanich@sgi.com> Acked-by: Christoph Lameter <cl@gentwo.org> Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
2012-08-01mm: fix lost kswapd wakeup in kswapd_stop()Aaditya Kumar
commit 1c7e7f6c0703d03af6bcd5ccc11fc15d23e5ecbe upstream. Offlining memory may block forever, waiting for kswapd() to wake up because kswapd() does not check the event kthread->should_stop before sleeping. The proper pattern, from Documentation/memory-barriers.txt, is: --- waker --- event_indicated = 1; wake_up_process(event_daemon); --- sleeper --- for (;;) { set_current_state(TASK_UNINTERRUPTIBLE); if (event_indicated) break; schedule(); } set_current_state() may be wrapped by: prepare_to_wait(); In the kswapd() case, event_indicated is kthread->should_stop. === offlining memory (waker) === kswapd_stop() kthread_stop() kthread->should_stop = 1 wake_up_process() wait_for_completion() === kswapd_try_to_sleep (sleeper) === kswapd_try_to_sleep() prepare_to_wait() . . schedule() . . finish_wait() The schedule() needs to be protected by a test of kthread->should_stop, which is wrapped by kthread_should_stop(). Reproducer: Do heavy file I/O in background. Do a memory offline/online in a tight loop Signed-off-by: Aaditya Kumar <aaditya.kumar@ap.sony.com> Acked-by: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com> Reviewed-by: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org> Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
2012-07-16mm: Hold a file reference in madvise_removeAndy Lutomirski
commit 9ab4233dd08036fe34a89c7dc6f47a8bf2eb29eb upstream. Otherwise the code races with munmap (causing a use-after-free of the vma) or with close (causing a use-after-free of the struct file). The bug was introduced by commit 90ed52ebe481 ("[PATCH] holepunch: fix mmap_sem i_mutex deadlock") [bwh: Backported to 3.2: - Adjust context - madvise_remove() calls vmtruncate_range(), not do_fallocate()] [luto: Backported to 3.0: Adjust context] Cc: Hugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com> Cc: Miklos Szeredi <mszeredi@suse.cz> Cc: Badari Pulavarty <pbadari@us.ibm.com> Cc: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de> Signed-off-by: Ben Hutchings <ben@decadent.org.uk> Signed-off-by: Andy Lutomirski <luto@amacapital.net> Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
2012-07-16mm, thp: abort compaction if migration page cannot be charged to memcgDavid Rientjes
commit 4bf2bba3750f10aa9e62e6949bc7e8329990f01b upstream. If page migration cannot charge the temporary page to the memcg, migrate_pages() will return -ENOMEM. This isn't considered in memory compaction however, and the loop continues to iterate over all pageblocks trying to isolate and migrate pages. If a small number of very large memcgs happen to be oom, however, these attempts will mostly be futile leading to an enormous amout of cpu consumption due to the page migration failures. This patch will short circuit and fail memory compaction if migrate_pages() returns -ENOMEM. COMPACT_PARTIAL is returned in case some migrations were successful so that the page allocator will retry. Signed-off-by: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com> Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de> Cc: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org> Cc: Kamezawa Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com> Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com> Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
2012-07-16memory hotplug: fix invalid memory access caused by stale kswapd pointerJiang Liu
commit d8adde17e5f858427504725218c56aef90e90fc7 upstream. kswapd_stop() is called to destroy the kswapd work thread when all memory of a NUMA node has been offlined. But kswapd_stop() only terminates the work thread without resetting NODE_DATA(nid)->kswapd to NULL. The stale pointer will prevent kswapd_run() from creating a new work thread when adding memory to the memory-less NUMA node again. Eventually the stale pointer may cause invalid memory access. An example stack dump as below. It's reproduced with 2.6.32, but latest kernel has the same issue. BUG: unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference at (null) IP: [<ffffffff81051a94>] exit_creds+0x12/0x78 PGD 0 Oops: 0000 [#1] SMP last sysfs file: /sys/devices/system/memory/memory391/state CPU 11 Modules linked in: cpufreq_conservative cpufreq_userspace cpufreq_powersave acpi_cpufreq microcode fuse loop dm_mod tpm_tis rtc_cmos i2c_i801 rtc_core tpm serio_raw pcspkr sg tpm_bios igb i2c_core iTCO_wdt rtc_lib mptctl iTCO_vendor_support button dca bnx2 usbhid hid uhci_hcd ehci_hcd usbcore sd_mod crc_t10dif edd ext3 mbcache jbd fan ide_pci_generic ide_core ata_generic ata_piix libata thermal processor thermal_sys hwmon mptsas mptscsih mptbase scsi_transport_sas scsi_mod Pid: 7949, comm: sh Not tainted 2.6.32.12-qiuxishi-5-default #92 Tecal RH2285 RIP: 0010:exit_creds+0x12/0x78 RSP: 0018:ffff8806044f1d78 EFLAGS: 00010202 RAX: 0000000000000000 RBX: ffff880604f22140 RCX: 0000000000019502 RDX: 0000000000000000 RSI: 0000000000000202 RDI: 0000000000000000 RBP: ffff880604f22150 R08: 0000000000000000 R09: ffffffff81a4dc10 R10: 00000000000032a0 R11: ffff880006202500 R12: 0000000000000000 R13: 0000000000c40000 R14: 0000000000008000 R15: 0000000000000001 FS: 00007fbc03d066f0(0000) GS:ffff8800282e0000(0000) knlGS:0000000000000000 CS: 0010 DS: 0000 ES: 0000 CR0: 000000008005003b CR2: 0000000000000000 CR3: 000000060f029000 CR4: 00000000000006e0 DR0: 0000000000000000 DR1: 0000000000000000 DR2: 0000000000000000 DR3: 0000000000000000 DR6: 00000000ffff0ff0 DR7: 0000000000000400 Process sh (pid: 7949, threadinfo ffff8806044f0000, task ffff880603d7c600) Stack: ffff880604f22140 ffffffff8103aac5 ffff880604f22140 ffffffff8104d21e ffff880006202500 0000000000008000 0000000000c38000 ffffffff810bd5b1 0000000000000000 ffff880603d7c600 00000000ffffdd29 0000000000000003 Call Trace: __put_task_struct+0x5d/0x97 kthread_stop+0x50/0x58 offline_pages+0x324/0x3da memory_block_change_state+0x179/0x1db store_mem_state+0x9e/0xbb sysfs_write_file+0xd0/0x107 vfs_write+0xad/0x169 sys_write+0x45/0x6e system_call_fastpath+0x16/0x1b Code: ff 4d 00 0f 94 c0 84 c0 74 08 48 89 ef e8 1f fd ff ff 5b 5d 31 c0 41 5c c3 53 48 8b 87 20 06 00 00 48 89 fb 48 8b bf 18 06 00 00 <8b> 00 48 c7 83 18 06 00 00 00 00 00 00 f0 ff 0f 0f 94 c0 84 c0 RIP exit_creds+0x12/0x78 RSP <ffff8806044f1d78> CR2: 0000000000000000 [akpm@linux-foundation.org: add pglist_data.kswapd locking comments] Signed-off-by: Xishi Qiu <qiuxishi@huawei.com> Signed-off-by: Jiang Liu <jiang.liu@huawei.com> Acked-by: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com> Acked-by: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com> Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de> Acked-by: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com> Reviewed-by: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
2012-06-17hugetlb: fix resv_map leak in error pathDave Hansen
commit c50ac050811d6485616a193eb0f37bfbd191cc89 and 4523e1458566a0e8ecfaff90f380dd23acc44d27 upstream. When called for anonymous (non-shared) mappings, hugetlb_reserve_pages() does a resv_map_alloc(). It depends on code in hugetlbfs's vm_ops->close() to release that allocation. However, in the mmap() failure path, we do a plain unmap_region() without the remove_vma() which actually calls vm_ops->close(). This is a decent fix. This leak could get reintroduced if new code (say, after hugetlb_reserve_pages() in hugetlbfs_file_mmap()) decides to return an error. But, I think it would have to unroll the reservation anyway. Christoph's test case: http://marc.info/?l=linux-mm&m=133728900729735 This patch applies to 3.4 and later. A version for earlier kernels is at https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/5/22/418. Signed-off-by: Dave Hansen <dave@linux.vnet.ibm.com> Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie> Acked-by: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com> Reported-by: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux.com> Tested-by: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux.com> Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
2012-06-17mm: fix faulty initialization in vmalloc_init()KyongHo
commit dbda591d920b4c7692725b13e3f68ecb251e9080 upstream. The transfer of ->flags causes some of the static mapping virtual addresses to be prematurely freed (before the mapping is removed) because VM_LAZY_FREE gets "set" if tmp->flags has VM_IOREMAP set. This might cause subsequent vmalloc/ioremap calls to fail because it might allocate one of the freed virtual address ranges that aren't unmapped. va->flags has different types of flags from tmp->flags. If a region with VM_IOREMAP set is registered with vm_area_add_early(), it will be removed by __purge_vmap_area_lazy(). Fix vmalloc_init() to correctly initialize vmap_area for the given vm_struct. Also initialise va->vm. If it is not set, find_vm_area() for the early vm regions will always fail. Signed-off-by: KyongHo Cho <pullip.cho@samsung.com> Cc: "Olav Haugan" <ohaugan@codeaurora.org> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
2012-06-17mm/vmalloc.c: change void* into explict vm_struct*Minchan Kim
commit db1aecafef58b5dda39c4228debe2c845e4a27ab upstream. vmap_area->private is void* but we don't use the field for various purpose but use only for vm_struct. So change it to a vm_struct* with naming to improve for readability and type checking. Signed-off-by: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org> Acked-by: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
2012-06-10mm: consider all swapped back pages in used-once logicMichal Hocko
commit e48982734ea0500d1eba4f9d96195acc5406cad6 upstream. Commit 645747462435 ("vmscan: detect mapped file pages used only once") made mapped pages have another round in inactive list because they might be just short lived and so we could consider them again next time. This heuristic helps to reduce pressure on the active list with a streaming IO worklods. This patch fixes a regression introduced by this commit for heavy shmem based workloads because unlike Anon pages, which are excluded from this heuristic because they are usually long lived, shmem pages are handled as a regular page cache. This doesn't work quite well, unfortunately, if the workload is mostly backed by shmem (in memory database sitting on 80% of memory) with a streaming IO in the background (backup - up to 20% of memory). Anon inactive list is full of (dirty) shmem pages when watermarks are hit. Shmem pages are kept in the inactive list (they are referenced) in the first round and it is hard to reclaim anything else so we reach lower scanning priorities very quickly which leads to an excessive swap out. Let's fix this by excluding all swap backed pages (they tend to be long lived wrt. the regular page cache anyway) from used-once heuristic and rather activate them if they are referenced. The customer's workload is shmem backed database (80% of RAM) and they are measuring transactions/s with an IO in the background (20%). Transactions touch more or less random rows in the table. The transaction rate fell by a factor of 3 (in the worst case) because of commit 64574746. This patch restores the previous numbers. Signed-off-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.cz> Acked-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org> Cc: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie> Cc: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org> Cc: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com> Reviewed-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
2012-06-01mm: mempolicy: Let vma_merge and vma_split handle vma->vm_policy linkagesMel Gorman
commit 05f144a0d5c2207a0349348127f996e104ad7404 upstream. Dave Jones' system call fuzz testing tool "trinity" triggered the following bug error with slab debugging enabled ============================================================================= BUG numa_policy (Not tainted): Poison overwritten ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- INFO: 0xffff880146498250-0xffff880146498250. First byte 0x6a instead of 0x6b INFO: Allocated in mpol_new+0xa3/0x140 age=46310 cpu=6 pid=32154 __slab_alloc+0x3d3/0x445 kmem_cache_alloc+0x29d/0x2b0 mpol_new+0xa3/0x140 sys_mbind+0x142/0x620 system_call_fastpath+0x16/0x1b INFO: Freed in __mpol_put+0x27/0x30 age=46268 cpu=6 pid=32154 __slab_free+0x2e/0x1de kmem_cache_free+0x25a/0x260 __mpol_put+0x27/0x30 remove_vma+0x68/0x90 exit_mmap+0x118/0x140 mmput+0x73/0x110 exit_mm+0x108/0x130 do_exit+0x162/0xb90 do_group_exit+0x4f/0xc0 sys_exit_group+0x17/0x20 system_call_fastpath+0x16/0x1b INFO: Slab 0xffffea0005192600 objects=27 used=27 fp=0x (null) flags=0x20000000004080 INFO: Object 0xffff880146498250 @offset=592 fp=0xffff88014649b9d0 This implied a reference counting bug and the problem happened during mbind(). mbind() applies a new memory policy to a range and uses mbind_range() to merge existing VMAs or split them as necessary. In the event of splits, mpol_dup() will allocate a new struct mempolicy and maintain existing reference counts whose rules are documented in Documentation/vm/numa_memory_policy.txt . The problem occurs with shared memory policies. The vm_op->set_policy increments the reference count if necessary and split_vma() and vma_merge() have already handled the existing reference counts. However, policy_vma() screws it up by replacing an existing vma->vm_policy with one that potentially has the wrong reference count leading to a premature free. This patch removes the damage caused by policy_vma(). With this patch applied Dave's trinity tool runs an mbind test for 5 minutes without error. /proc/slabinfo reported that there are no numa_policy or shared_policy_node objects allocated after the test completed and the shared memory region was deleted. Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de> Cc: Dave Jones <davej@redhat.com> Cc: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com> Cc: Stephen Wilson <wilsons@start.ca> Cc: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux.com> Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
2012-05-21memcg: free spare array to avoid memory leakSha Zhengju
commit 8c7577637ca31385e92769a77e2ab5b428e8b99c upstream. When the last event is unregistered, there is no need to keep the spare array anymore. So free it to avoid memory leak. Signed-off-by: Sha Zhengju <handai.szj@taobao.com> Acked-by: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com> Reviewed-by: Kirill A. Shutemov <kirill@shutemov.name> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
2012-05-21mm: nobootmem: fix sign extend problem in __free_pages_memory()Russ Anderson
commit 6bc2e853c6b46a6041980d58200ad9b0a73a60ff upstream. Systems with 8 TBytes of memory or greater can hit a problem where only the the first 8 TB of memory shows up. This is due to "int i" being smaller than "unsigned long start_aligned", causing the high bits to be dropped. The fix is to change `i' to unsigned long to match start_aligned and end_aligned. Thanks to Jack Steiner for assistance tracking this down. Signed-off-by: Russ Anderson <rja@sgi.com> Cc: Jack Steiner <steiner@sgi.com> Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org> Cc: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org> Cc: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net> Cc: Yinghai Lu <yinghai@kernel.org> Cc: Gavin Shan <shangw@linux.vnet.ibm.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
2012-05-21hugetlb: prevent BUG_ON in hugetlb_fault() -> hugetlb_cow()Chris Metcalf
commit 4998a6c0edce7fae9c0a5463f6ec3fa585258ee7 upstream. Commit 66aebce747eaf ("hugetlb: fix race condition in hugetlb_fault()") added code to avoid a race condition by elevating the page refcount in hugetlb_fault() while calling hugetlb_cow(). However, one code path in hugetlb_cow() includes an assertion that the page count is 1, whereas it may now also have the value 2 in this path. The consensus is that this BUG_ON has served its purpose, so rather than extending it to cover both cases, we just remove it. Signed-off-by: Chris Metcalf <cmetcalf@tilera.com> Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie> Acked-by: Hillf Danton <dhillf@gmail.com> Acked-by: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com> Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.cz> Cc: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
2012-05-21percpu: pcpu_embed_first_chunk() should free unused parts after all allocs ↵Tejun Heo
are complete commit 42b64281453249dac52861f9b97d18552a7ec62b upstream. pcpu_embed_first_chunk() allocates memory for each node, copies percpu data and frees unused portions of it before proceeding to the next group. This assumes that allocations for different nodes doesn't overlap; however, depending on memory topology, the bootmem allocator may end up allocating memory from a different node than the requested one which may overlap with the portion freed from one of the previous percpu areas. This leads to percpu groups for different nodes overlapping which is a serious bug. This patch separates out copy & partial free from the allocation loop such that all allocations are complete before partial frees happen. This also fixes overlapping frees which could happen on allocation failure path - out_free_areas path frees whole groups but the groups could have portions freed at that point. Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org> Reported-by: "Pavel V. Panteleev" <pp_84@mail.ru> Tested-by: "Pavel V. Panteleev" <pp_84@mail.ru> LKML-Reference: <E1SNhwY-0007ui-V7.pp_84-mail-ru@f220.mail.ru> Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
2012-04-27mm: fix s390 BUG by __set_page_dirty_no_writeback on swapHugh Dickins
commit aca50bd3b4c4bb5528a1878158ba7abce41de534 upstream. Mel reports a BUG_ON(slot == NULL) in radix_tree_tag_set() on s390 3.0.13: called from __set_page_dirty_nobuffers() when page_remove_rmap() tries to transfer dirty flag from s390 storage key to struct page and radix_tree. That would be because of reclaim's shrink_page_list() calling add_to_swap() on this page at the same time: first PageSwapCache is set (causing page_mapping(page) to appear as &swapper_space), then page->private set, then tree_lock taken, then page inserted into radix_tree - so there's an interval before taking the lock when the radix_tree slot is empty. We could fix this by moving __add_to_swap_cache()'s spin_lock_irq up before the SetPageSwapCache. But a better fix is simply to do what's five years overdue: Ken Chen introduced __set_page_dirty_no_writeback() (if !PageDirty TestSetPageDirty) for tmpfs to skip all the radix_tree overhead, and swap is just the same - it ignores the radix_tree tag, and does not participate in dirty page accounting, so should be using __set_page_dirty_no_writeback() too. s390 testing now confirms that this does indeed fix the problem. Reported-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de> Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com> Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de> Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Cc: Martin Schwidefsky <schwidefsky@de.ibm.com> Cc: Heiko Carstens <heiko.carstens@de.ibm.com> Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com> Cc: Ken Chen <kenchen@google.com> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
2012-04-22hugetlb: fix race condition in hugetlb_fault()Chris Metcalf
commit 66aebce747eaf9bc456bf1f1b217d8db843031d0 upstream. The race is as follows: Suppose a multi-threaded task forks a new process (on cpu A), thus bumping up the ref count on all the pages. While the fork is occurring (and thus we have marked all the PTEs as read-only), another thread in the original process (on cpu B) tries to write to a huge page, taking an access violation from the write-protect and calling hugetlb_cow(). Now, suppose the fork() fails. It will undo the COW and decrement the ref count on the pages, so the ref count on the huge page drops back to 1. Meanwhile hugetlb_cow() also decrements the ref count by one on the original page, since the original address space doesn't need it any more, having copied a new page to replace the original page. This leaves the ref count at zero, and when we call unlock_page(), we panic. fork on CPU A fault on CPU B ============= ============== ... down_write(&parent->mmap_sem); down_write_nested(&child->mmap_sem); ... while duplicating vmas if error break; ... up_write(&child->mmap_sem); up_write(&parent->mmap_sem); ... down_read(&parent->mmap_sem); ... lock_page(page); handle COW page_mapcount(old_page) == 2 alloc and prepare new_page ... handle error page_remove_rmap(page); put_page(page); ... fold new_page into pte page_remove_rmap(page); put_page(page); ... oops ==> unlock_page(page); up_read(&parent->mmap_sem); The solution is to take an extra reference to the page while we are holding the lock on it. Signed-off-by: Chris Metcalf <cmetcalf@tilera.com> Cc: Hillf Danton <dhillf@gmail.com> Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.cz> Cc: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com> Cc: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
2012-04-02slub: Do not hold slub_lock when calling sysfs_slab_add()Christoph Lameter
commit 66c4c35c6bc5a1a452b024cf0364635b28fd94e4 upstream. sysfs_slab_add() calls various sysfs functions that actually may end up in userspace doing all sorts of things. Release the slub_lock after adding the kmem_cache structure to the list. At that point the address of the kmem_cache is not known so we are guaranteed exlusive access to the following modifications to the kmem_cache structure. If the sysfs_slab_add fails then reacquire the slub_lock to remove the kmem_cache structure from the list. Reported-by: Sasha Levin <levinsasha928@gmail.com> Acked-by: Eric Dumazet <eric.dumazet@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux.com> Signed-off-by: Pekka Enberg <penberg@kernel.org> Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
2012-04-02bootmem/sparsemem: remove limit constraint in alloc_bootmem_sectionNishanth Aravamudan
commit f5bf18fa22f8c41a13eb8762c7373eb3a93a7333 upstream. While testing AMS (Active Memory Sharing) / CMO (Cooperative Memory Overcommit) on powerpc, we tripped the following: kernel BUG at mm/bootmem.c:483! cpu 0x0: Vector: 700 (Program Check) at [c000000000c03940] pc: c000000000a62bd8: .alloc_bootmem_core+0x90/0x39c lr: c000000000a64bcc: .sparse_early_usemaps_alloc_node+0x84/0x29c sp: c000000000c03bc0 msr: 8000000000021032 current = 0xc000000000b0cce0 paca = 0xc000000001d80000 pid = 0, comm = swapper kernel BUG at mm/bootmem.c:483! enter ? for help [c000000000c03c80] c000000000a64bcc .sparse_early_usemaps_alloc_node+0x84/0x29c [c000000000c03d50] c000000000a64f10 .sparse_init+0x12c/0x28c [c000000000c03e20] c000000000a474f4 .setup_arch+0x20c/0x294 [c000000000c03ee0] c000000000a4079c .start_kernel+0xb4/0x460 [c000000000c03f90] c000000000009670 .start_here_common+0x1c/0x2c This is BUG_ON(limit && goal + size > limit); and after some debugging, it seems that goal = 0x7ffff000000 limit = 0x80000000000 and sparse_early_usemaps_alloc_node -> sparse_early_usemaps_alloc_pgdat_section calls return alloc_bootmem_section(usemap_size() * count, section_nr); This is on a system with 8TB available via the AMS pool, and as a quirk of AMS in firmware, all of that memory shows up in node 0. So, we end up with an allocation that will fail the goal/limit constraints. In theory, we could "fall-back" to alloc_bootmem_node() in sparse_early_usemaps_alloc_node(), but since we actually have HOTREMOVE defined, we'll BUG_ON() instead. A simple solution appears to be to unconditionally remove the limit condition in alloc_bootmem_section, meaning allocations are allowed to cross section boundaries (necessary for systems of this size). Johannes Weiner pointed out that if alloc_bootmem_section() no longer guarantees section-locality, we need check_usemap_section_nr() to print possible cross-dependencies between node descriptors and the usemaps allocated through it. That makes the two loops in sparse_early_usemaps_alloc_node() identical, so re-factor the code a bit. [akpm@linux-foundation.org: code simplification] Signed-off-by: Nishanth Aravamudan <nacc@us.ibm.com> Cc: Dave Hansen <haveblue@us.ibm.com> Cc: Anton Blanchard <anton@au1.ibm.com> Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org> Cc: Ben Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org> Cc: Robert Jennings <rcj@linux.vnet.ibm.com> Acked-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org> Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
2012-04-02mm: thp: fix pmd_bad() triggering in code paths holding mmap_sem read modeAndrea Arcangeli
commit 1a5a9906d4e8d1976b701f889d8f35d54b928f25 upstream. In some cases it may happen that pmd_none_or_clear_bad() is called with the mmap_sem hold in read mode. In those cases the huge page faults can allocate hugepmds under pmd_none_or_clear_bad() and that can trigger a false positive from pmd_bad() that will not like to see a pmd materializing as trans huge. It's not khugepaged causing the problem, khugepaged holds the mmap_sem in write mode (and all those sites must hold the mmap_sem in read mode to prevent pagetables to go away from under them, during code review it seems vm86 mode on 32bit kernels requires that too unless it's restricted to 1 thread per process or UP builds). The race is only with the huge pagefaults that can convert a pmd_none() into a pmd_trans_huge(). Effectively all these pmd_none_or_clear_bad() sites running with mmap_sem in read mode are somewhat speculative with the page faults, and the result is always undefined when they run simultaneously. This is probably why it wasn't common to run into this. For example if the madvise(MADV_DONTNEED) runs zap_page_range() shortly before the page fault, the hugepage will not be zapped, if the page fault runs first it will be zapped. Altering pmd_bad() not to error out if it finds hugepmds won't be enough to fix this, because zap_pmd_range would then proceed to call zap_pte_range (which would be incorrect if the pmd become a pmd_trans_huge()). The simplest way to fix this is to read the pmd in the local stack (regardless of what we read, no need of actual CPU barriers, only compiler barrier needed), and be sure it is not changing under the code that computes its value. Even if the real pmd is changing under the value we hold on the stack, we don't care. If we actually end up in zap_pte_range it means the pmd was not none already and it was not huge, and it can't become huge from under us (khugepaged locking explained above). All we need is to enforce that there is no way anymore that in a code path like below, pmd_trans_huge can be false, but pmd_none_or_clear_bad can run into a hugepmd. The overhead of a barrier() is just a compiler tweak and should not be measurable (I only added it for THP builds). I don't exclude different compiler versions may have prevented the race too by caching the value of *pmd on the stack (that hasn't been verified, but it wouldn't be impossible considering pmd_none_or_clear_bad, pmd_bad, pmd_trans_huge, pmd_none are all inlines and there's no external function called in between pmd_trans_huge and pmd_none_or_clear_bad). if (pmd_trans_huge(*pmd)) { if (next-addr != HPAGE_PMD_SIZE) { VM_BUG_ON(!rwsem_is_locked(&tlb->mm->mmap_sem)); split_huge_page_pmd(vma->vm_mm, pmd); } else if (zap_huge_pmd(tlb, vma, pmd, addr)) continue; /* fall through */ } if (pmd_none_or_clear_bad(pmd)) Because this race condition could be exercised without special privileges this was reported in CVE-2012-1179. The race was identified and fully explained by Ulrich who debugged it. I'm quoting his accurate explanation below, for reference. ====== start quote ======= mapcount 0 page_mapcount 1 kernel BUG at mm/huge_memory.c:1384! At some point prior to the panic, a "bad pmd ..." message similar to the following is logged on the console: mm/memory.c:145: bad pmd ffff8800376e1f98(80000000314000e7). The "bad pmd ..." message is logged by pmd_clear_bad() before it clears the page's PMD table entry. 143 void pmd_clear_bad(pmd_t *pmd) 144 { -> 145 pmd_ERROR(*pmd); 146 pmd_clear(pmd); 147 } After the PMD table entry has been cleared, there is an inconsistency between the actual number of PMD table entries that are mapping the page and the page's map count (_mapcount field in struct page). When the page is subsequently reclaimed, __split_huge_page() detects this inconsistency. 1381 if (mapcount != page_mapcount(page)) 1382 printk(KERN_ERR "mapcount %d page_mapcount %d\n", 1383 mapcount, page_mapcount(page)); -> 1384 BUG_ON(mapcount != page_mapcount(page)); The root cause of the problem is a race of two threads in a multithreaded process. Thread B incurs a page fault on a virtual address that has never been accessed (PMD entry is zero) while Thread A is executing an madvise() system call on a virtual address within the same 2 MB (huge page) range. virtual address space .---------------------. | | | | .-|---------------------| | | | | | |<-- B(fault) | | | 2 MB | |/////////////////////|-. huge < |/////////////////////| > A(range) page | |/////////////////////|-' | | | | | | '-|---------------------| | | | | '---------------------' - Thread A is executing an madvise(..., MADV_DONTNEED) system call on the virtual address range "A(range)" shown in the picture. sys_madvise // Acquire the semaphore in shared mode. down_read(&current->mm->mmap_sem) ... madvise_vma switch (behavior) case MADV_DONTNEED: madvise_dontneed zap_page_range unmap_vmas unmap_page_range zap_pud_range zap_pmd_range // // Assume that this huge page has never been accessed. // I.e. content of the PMD entry is zero (not mapped). // if (pmd_trans_huge(*pmd)) {