Re: [PATCH V2] mm/ptdump: Take the memory hotplug lock inside ptdump_walk_pgd()

From: Dev Jain
Date: Tue Jun 24 2025 - 09:25:04 EST



On 20/06/25 10:54 am, Anshuman Khandual wrote:
Memory hot remove unmaps and tears down various kernel page table regions
as required. The ptdump code can race with concurrent modifications of the
kernel page tables. When leaf entries are modified concurrently, the dump
code may log stale or inconsistent information for a VA range, but this is
otherwise not harmful.

But when intermediate levels of kernel page table are freed, the dump code
will continue to use memory that has been freed and potentially reallocated
for another purpose. In such cases, the ptdump code may dereference bogus
addresses, leading to a number of potential problems.

To avoid the above mentioned race condition, platforms such as arm64, riscv
and s390 take memory hotplug lock, while dumping kernel page table via the
sysfs interface /sys/kernel/debug/kernel_page_tables.

Similar race condition exists while checking for pages that might have been
marked W+X via /sys/kernel/debug/kernel_page_tables/check_wx_pages which in
turn calls ptdump_check_wx(). Instead of solving this race condition again,
let's just move the memory hotplug lock inside generic ptdump_check_wx()
which will benefit both the scenarios.

Drop get_online_mems() and put_online_mems() combination from all existing
platform ptdump code paths.

Cc: Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas@xxxxxxx>
Cc: Will Deacon <will@xxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: Ryan Roberts <ryan.roberts@xxxxxxx>
Cc: Paul Walmsley <paul.walmsley@xxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: Palmer Dabbelt <palmer@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: Alexander Gordeev <agordeev@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: Gerald Schaefer <gerald.schaefer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: Heiko Carstens <hca@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: Vasily Gorbik <gor@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: Christian Borntraeger <borntraeger@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: Sven Schnelle <svens@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
CC: linux-arm-kernel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Cc: linux-kernel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Cc: linux-riscv@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Cc: linux-s390@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Cc: linux-mm@xxxxxxxxx
Signed-off-by: Anshuman Khandual <anshuman.khandual@xxxxxxx>
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Reviewed-by: Dev Jain <dev.jain@xxxxxxx>