Re: [RFC PATCH] hwpoison, memory_hotplug: allow hwpoisoned pages to be offlined

From: Naoya Horiguchi
Date: Tue Dec 04 2018 - 02:25:02 EST


On Mon, Dec 03, 2018 at 11:03:09AM +0100, Michal Hocko wrote:
> From: Michal Hocko <mhocko@xxxxxxxx>
>
> We have received a bug report that an injected MCE about faulty memory
> prevents memory offline to succeed. The underlying reason is that the
> HWPoison page has an elevated reference count and the migration keeps
> failing. There are two problems with that. First of all it is dubious
> to migrate the poisoned page because we know that accessing that memory
> is possible to fail. Secondly it doesn't make any sense to migrate a
> potentially broken content and preserve the memory corruption over to a
> new location.
>
> Oscar has found out that it is the elevated reference count from
> memory_failure that is confusing the offlining path. HWPoisoned pages
> are isolated from the LRU list but __offline_pages might still try to
> migrate them if there is any preceding migrateable pages in the pfn
> range. Such a migration would fail due to the reference count but
> the migration code would put it back on the LRU list. This is quite
> wrong in itself but it would also make scan_movable_pages stumble over
> it again without any way out.
>
> This means that the hotremove with hwpoisoned pages has never really
> worked (without a luck). HWPoisoning really needs a larger surgery
> but an immediate and backportable fix is to skip over these pages during
> offlining. Even if they are still mapped for some reason then
> try_to_unmap should turn those mappings into hwpoison ptes and cause
> SIGBUS on access. Nobody should be really touching the content of the
> page so it should be safe to ignore them even when there is a pending
> reference count.
>
> Debugged-by: Oscar Salvador <osalvador@xxxxxxxx>
> Cc: stable
> Signed-off-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@xxxxxxxx>
> ---
> Hi,
> I am sending this as an RFC now because I am not fully sure I see all
> the consequences myself yet. This has passed a testing by Oscar but I
> would highly appreciate a review from Naoya about my assumptions about
> hwpoisoning. E.g. it is not entirely clear to me whether there is a
> potential case where the page might be still mapped.

One potential case is ksm page, for which we give up unmapping and leave
it unmapped. Rather than that I don't have any idea, but any new type of
page would be potentially categorized to this class.

> I have put
> try_to_unmap just to be sure. It would be really great if I could drop
> that part because then it is not really great which of the TTU flags to
> use to cover all potential cases.
>
> I have marked the patch for stable but I have no idea how far back it
> should go. Probably everything that already has hotremove and hwpoison
> code.

Yes, maybe this could be ported to all active stable trees.

>
> Thanks in advance!
>
> mm/memory_hotplug.c | 12 ++++++++++++
> 1 file changed, 12 insertions(+)
>
> diff --git a/mm/memory_hotplug.c b/mm/memory_hotplug.c
> index c6c42a7425e5..08c576d5a633 100644
> --- a/mm/memory_hotplug.c
> +++ b/mm/memory_hotplug.c
> @@ -34,6 +34,7 @@
> #include <linux/hugetlb.h>
> #include <linux/memblock.h>
> #include <linux/compaction.h>
> +#include <linux/rmap.h>
>
> #include <asm/tlbflush.h>
>
> @@ -1366,6 +1367,17 @@ do_migrate_range(unsigned long start_pfn, unsigned long end_pfn)
> pfn = page_to_pfn(compound_head(page))
> + hpage_nr_pages(page) - 1;
>
> + /*
> + * HWPoison pages have elevated reference counts so the migration would
> + * fail on them. It also doesn't make any sense to migrate them in the
> + * first place. Still try to unmap such a page in case it is still mapped.
> + */
> + if (PageHWPoison(page)) {
> + if (page_mapped(page))
> + try_to_unmap(page, TTU_IGNORE_MLOCK | TTU_IGNORE_ACCESS);
> + continue;
> + }
> +

I think this looks OK (no better idea.)

Reviewed-by: Naoya Horiguchi <n-horiguchi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>

I wondered why I didn't find this for long, and found that my testing only
covered the case where PageHWPoison is the first page of memory block.
scan_movable_pages() considers PageHWPoison as non-movable, so do_migrate_range()
started with pfn after the PageHWPoison and never tried to migrate it
(so effectively ignored every PageHWPoison as the above code does.)

Thanks,
Naoya Horiguchi

> if (!get_page_unless_zero(page))
> continue;
> /*
> --
> 2.19.1
>
>