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Message-ID: <YfGZ/0hhkqVeX04p@casper.infradead.org>
Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2022 18:59:11 +0000
From: Matthew Wilcox <willy@...radead.org>
To: Pasha Tatashin <pasha.tatashin@...een.com>
Cc: linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, linux-mm@...ck.org,
linux-m68k@...ts.linux-m68k.org, anshuman.khandual@....com,
akpm@...ux-foundation.org, william.kucharski@...cle.com,
mike.kravetz@...cle.com, vbabka@...e.cz, geert@...ux-m68k.org,
schmitzmic@...il.com, rostedt@...dmis.org, mingo@...hat.com,
hannes@...xchg.org, guro@...com, songmuchun@...edance.com,
weixugc@...gle.com, gthelen@...gle.com, rientjes@...gle.com,
pjt@...gle.com, hughd@...gle.com
Subject: Re: [PATCH v3 1/9] mm: add overflow and underflow checks for
page->_refcount
On Wed, Jan 26, 2022 at 06:34:21PM +0000, Pasha Tatashin wrote:
> The problems with page->_refcount are hard to debug, because usually
> when they are detected, the damage has occurred a long time ago. Yet,
> the problems with invalid page refcount may be catastrophic and lead to
> memory corruptions.
>
> Reduce the scope of when the _refcount problems manifest themselves by
> adding checks for underflows and overflows into functions that modify
> _refcount.
If you're chasing a bug like this, presumably you turn on page
tracepoints. So could we reduce the cost of this by putting the
VM_BUG_ON_PAGE parts into __page_ref_mod() et al? Yes, we'd need to
change the arguments to those functions to pass in old & new, but that
should be a cheap change compared to embedding the VM_BUG_ON_PAGE.
> static inline void page_ref_add(struct page *page, int nr)
> {
> - atomic_add(nr, &page->_refcount);
> + int old_val = atomic_fetch_add(nr, &page->_refcount);
> + int new_val = old_val + nr;
> +
> + VM_BUG_ON_PAGE((unsigned int)new_val < (unsigned int)old_val, page);
> if (page_ref_tracepoint_active(page_ref_mod))
> __page_ref_mod(page, nr);
> }
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