linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH RFC 1/1] mm/ksm: Add recovery mechanism for memory failures

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Message-ID: <3954ac60-e818-42a0-b114-c2a09d34572b@linux.dev>
Date: Sat, 11 Oct 2025 20:57:54 +0800
From: Lance Yang <lance.yang@...ux.dev>
To: Miaohe Lin <linmiaohe@...wei.com>, qiuxu.zhuo@...el.com
Cc: Longlong Xia <xialonglong2025@....com>, nao.horiguchi@...il.com,
 akpm@...ux-foundation.org, wangkefeng.wang@...wei.com, xu.xin16@....com.cn,
 linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, linux-mm@...ck.org,
 Longlong Xia <xialonglong@...inos.cn>, david@...hat.com
Subject: Re: [PATCH RFC 1/1] mm/ksm: Add recovery mechanism for memory
 failures

Cc Qiuxu

On 2025/10/11 17:38, Lance Yang wrote:
> 
> 
> On 2025/10/11 17:23, Miaohe Lin wrote:
>> On 2025/10/11 15:52, Lance Yang wrote:
>>> @Miaohe
>>>
>>> I'd like to raise a concern about a potential hardware failure :)
>>
>> Thanks for your thought.
>>
>>>
>>> My tests show that if the shared zeropage (or huge zeropage) gets marked
>>> with HWpoison, the kernel continues to install it for new mappings.
>>> Surprisingly, it does not kill the accessing process ...
>>
>> Have you investigated the cause? If user space writes to shared zeropage,
>> it will trigger COW and a new page will be installed. After that, reading
>> the newly allocated page won't trigger memory error. In this scene, it 
>> does
>> not kill the accessing process.
> 
> Not write just read :)
> 
>>
>>>
>>> The concern is, once the page is no longer zero-filled due to the 
>>> hardware
>>> failure, what will happen? Would this lead to silent data corruption for
>>> applications that expect to read zeros?
>>
>> IMHO, once the page is no longer zero-filled due to the hardware 
>> failure, later
>> any read will trigger memory error and memory_failure should handle that.
> 
> I've only tested injecting an error on the shared zeropage using 
> corrupt-pfn:
> 
> echo $PFN > /sys/kernel/debug/hwpoison/corrupt-pfn
> 
> But no memory error was triggered on a subsequent read ...
> 
> Anyway, I'm trying to explore other ways to simulate hardware failure :)
> 
> Thanks,
> Lance
>