• Linus Torvalds's avatar
    mm: don't try to NUMA-migrate COW pages that have other uses · 80d47f5d
    Linus Torvalds authored
    Oded Gabbay reports that enabling NUMA balancing causes corruption with
    his Gaudi accelerator test load:
    
     "All the details are in the bug, but the bottom line is that somehow,
      this patch causes corruption when the numa balancing feature is
      enabled AND we don't use process affinity AND we use GUP to pin pages
      so our accelerator can DMA to/from system memory.
    
      Either disabling numa balancing, using process affinity to bind to
      specific numa-node or reverting this patch causes the bug to
      disappear"
    
    and Oded bisected the issue to commit 09854ba9 ("mm: do_wp_page()
    simplification").
    
    Now, the NUMA balancing shouldn't actually be changing the writability
    of a page, and as such shouldn't matter for COW.  But it appears it
    does.  Suspicious.
    
    However, regardless of that, the condition for enabling NUMA faults in
    change_pte_range() is nonsensical.  It uses "page_mapcount(page)" to
    decide if a COW page should be NUMA-protected or not, and that makes
    absolutely no sense.
    
    The number of mappings a page has is irrelevant: not only does GUP get a
    reference to a page as in Oded's case, but the other mappings migth be
    paged out and the only reference to them would be in the page count.
    
    Since we should never try to NUMA-balance a page that we can't move
    anyway due to other references, just fix the code to use 'page_count()'.
    Oded confirms that that fixes his issue.
    
    Now, this does imply that something in NUMA balancing ends up changing
    page protections (other than the obvious one of making the page
    inaccessible to get the NUMA faulting information).  Otherwise the COW
    simplification wouldn't matter - since doing the GUP on the page would
    make sure it's writable.
    
    The cause of that permission change would be good to figure out too,
    since it clearly results in spurious COW events - but fixing the
    nonsensical test that just happened to work before is obviously the
    CorrectThing(tm) to do regardless.
    
    Fixes: 09854ba9 ("mm: do_wp_page() simplification")
    Link: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=215616
    Link: https://lore.kernel.org/all/CAFCwf10eNmwq2wD71xjUhqkvv5+_pJMR1nPug2RqNDcFT4H86Q@mail.gmail.com/Reported-and-tested-by: default avatarOded Gabbay <oded.gabbay@gmail.com>
    Cc: David Hildenbrand <david@redhat.com>
    Cc: Peter Xu <peterx@redhat.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
    80d47f5d
mprotect.c 17.7 KB