linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH v2] mm: page_mapped: don't assume compound page is huge or THP

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Date:   Mon, 18 Feb 2019 14:43:58 +0100
From:   Lars Persson <lists@...h.nu>
To:     Jan Stancek <jstancek@...hat.com>
Cc:     linux-mm@...ck.org, lersek@...hat.com,
        alex williamson <alex.williamson@...hat.com>,
        aarcange@...hat.com, rientjes@...gle.com, kirill@...temov.name,
        mgorman@...hsingularity.net, mhocko@...e.com,
        linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH v2] mm: page_mapped: don't assume compound page is huge or THP

On Tue, Feb 5, 2019 at 8:14 AM Jan Stancek <jstancek@...hat.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> are you using THP (CONFIG_TRANSPARENT_HUGEPAGE)?
>
> The changed line should affect only THP and normal compound pages,
> so a test with THP disabled might be interesting.
>
> >
> > The breakage consists of random processes dying with SIGILL or SIGSEGV
> > when we stress test the system with high memory pressure and explicit
> > memory compaction requested through /proc/sys/vm/compact_memory.
> > Reverting this patch fixes the crashes.
> >
> > We can put some effort on debugging if there are no obvious
> > explanations for this. Keep in mind that this is 32-bit system with
> > HIGHMEM.
>
> Nothing obvious that I can see. I've been trying to reproduce on
> 32-bit x86 Fedora with no luck so far.
>

Hi

Thanks for looking in to it. After some deep dive in MM code, I think
it is safe to say this patch was innocent.

All traces studied so far points to a missing cache coherency call in
mm/migrate.c:migrate_page that is needed only for those evil MIPSes
that lack I/D cache coherency. I will send a write-up to linux-mips
about this. Basically for a non-mapped page it does only a copy of
page data and metadata but no flush_dcache_page() call will be done.
This races with subsequent use of the page.

BR,
 Lars