• Hugh Dickins's avatar
    ksm: fix bad user data when swapping · 4e31635c
    Hugh Dickins authored
    Building under memory pressure, with KSM on 2.6.36-rc5, collapsed with
    an internal compiler error: typically indicating an error in swapping.
    
    Perhaps there's a timing issue which makes it now more likely, perhaps
    it's just a long time since I tried for so long: this bug goes back to
    KSM swapping in 2.6.33.
    
    Notice how reuse_swap_page() allows an exclusive page to be reused, but
    only does SetPageDirty if it can delete it from swap cache right then -
    if it's currently under Writeback, it has to be left in cache and we
    don't SetPageDirty, but the page can be reused.  Fine, the dirty bit
    will get set in the pte; but notice how zap_pte_range() does not bother
    to transfer pte_dirty to page_dirty when unmapping a PageAnon.
    
    If KSM chooses to share such a page, it will look like a clean copy of
    swapcache, and not be written out to swap when its memory is needed;
    then stale data read back from swap when it's needed again.
    
    We could fix this in reuse_swap_page() (or even refuse to reuse a
    page under writeback), but it's more honest to fix my oversight in
    KSM's write_protect_page().  Several days of testing on three machines
    confirms that this fixes the issue they showed.
    Signed-off-by: default avatarHugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
    Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
    Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com>
    Cc: stable@kernel.org
    Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
    4e31635c
ksm.c 52.5 KB