Re: [PATCH 2/4] mm: khugepaged: check if file page is on LRU after locking page

From: Kirill A. Shutemov
Date: Wed Sep 15 2021 - 07:49:49 EST


On Tue, Sep 14, 2021 at 11:37:16AM -0700, Yang Shi wrote:
> The khugepaged does check if the page is on LRU or not but it doesn't
> hold page lock. And it doesn't check this again after holding page
> lock. So it may race with some others, e.g. reclaimer, migration, etc.
> All of them isolates page from LRU then lock the page then do something.
>
> But it could pass the refcount check done by khugepaged to proceed
> collapse. Typically such race is not fatal. But if the page has been
> isolated from LRU before khugepaged it likely means the page may be not
> suitable for collapse for now.
>
> The other more fatal case is the following patch will keep the poisoned
> page in page cache for shmem, so khugepaged may collapse a poisoned page
> since the refcount check could pass. 3 refcounts come from:
> - hwpoison
> - page cache
> - khugepaged
>
> Since it is not on LRU so no refcount is incremented from LRU isolation.
>
> This is definitely not expected. Checking if it is on LRU or not after
> holding page lock could help serialize against hwpoison handler.
>
> But there is still a small race window between setting hwpoison flag and
> bump refcount in hwpoison handler. It could be closed by checking
> hwpoison flag in khugepaged, however this race seems unlikely to happen
> in real life workload. So just check LRU flag for now to avoid
> over-engineering.
>
> Signed-off-by: Yang Shi <shy828301@xxxxxxxxx>
> ---
> mm/khugepaged.c | 6 ++++++
> 1 file changed, 6 insertions(+)
>
> diff --git a/mm/khugepaged.c b/mm/khugepaged.c
> index 045cc579f724..bdc161dc27dc 100644
> --- a/mm/khugepaged.c
> +++ b/mm/khugepaged.c
> @@ -1808,6 +1808,12 @@ static void collapse_file(struct mm_struct *mm,
> goto out_unlock;
> }
>
> + /* The hwpoisoned page is off LRU but in page cache */
> + if (!PageLRU(page)) {
> + result = SCAN_PAGE_LRU;
> + goto out_unlock;
> + }
> +
> if (isolate_lru_page(page)) {

isolate_lru_page() should catch the case, no? TestClearPageLRU would fail
and we get here.

> result = SCAN_DEL_PAGE_LRU;
> goto out_unlock;
> --
> 2.26.2
>
>

--
Kirill A. Shutemov