Re: [PATCH V2] mm: fix use-after free of page_ext after race with memory-offline

From: Charan Teja Kalla
Date: Mon Aug 01 2022 - 07:54:32 EST


Thanks David!!

On 8/1/2022 2:00 PM, David Hildenbrand wrote:
>> Having said that, I am open to go for call_rcu() and infact it will be a
>> much simple change where I can do the freeing of page_ext in the
>> __free_page_ext() itself which is called for every section there by
>> avoid the extra tracking flag PAGE_EXT_INVALID.
>> ...........
>> WRITE_ONCE(ms->page_ext, NULL);
>> call_rcu(rcu_head, fun); // Free in fun()
>> .............
>>
>> Or your opinion is to use call_rcu () only once in place of
>> synchronize_rcu() after invalidating all the page_ext's of memory block?
>
> Yeah, that would be an option. And if you fail to allocate a temporary
> buffer to hold the data-to-free (structure containing rcu_head), the
> slower fallback path would be synchronize_rcu().
>

I will add this as a note in the code that in future If some
optimizations needs to be done in this path, this option can be
considered. Hope this will be fine for now?

> But again, I'm also not sure if we have to optimize here right now.

Thanks,
Charan