Re: [PATCH -mm] mm,numa,mprotect: always continue after finding a stable thp page

From: Mel Gorman
Date: Fri Mar 07 2014 - 10:14:13 EST


On Fri, Mar 07, 2014 at 03:09:23PM +0000, Mel Gorman wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 07, 2014 at 02:06:50PM +0000, Mel Gorman wrote:
> > On Thu, Mar 06, 2014 at 05:52:47PM -0500, Rik van Riel wrote:
> > > On 03/06/2014 05:31 PM, Rik van Riel wrote:
> > > >On Thu, 06 Mar 2014 16:12:28 -0500
> > > >Sasha Levin <sasha.levin@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > > >
> > > >>While fuzzing with trinity inside a KVM tools guest running latest -next kernel I've hit the
> > > >>following spew. This seems to be introduced by your patch "mm,numa: reorganize change_pmd_range()".
> > > >
> > > >That patch should not introduce any functional changes, except for
> > > >the VM_BUG_ON that catches the fact that we fell through to the 4kB
> > > >pte handling code, despite having just handled a THP pmd...
> > > >
> > > >Does this patch fix the issue?
> > > >
> > > >Mel, am I overlooking anything obvious? :)
> > > >
> > > >---8<---
> > > >
> > > >Subject: mm,numa,mprotect: always continue after finding a stable thp page
> > > >
> > > >When turning a thp pmds into a NUMA one, change_huge_pmd will
> > > >return 0 when the pmd already is a NUMA pmd.
> > >
> > > I did miss something obvious. In this case, the code returns 1.
> > >
> > > >However, change_pmd_range would fall through to the code that
> > > >handles 4kB pages, instead of continuing on to the next pmd.
> > >
> > > Maybe the case that I missed is when khugepaged is in the
> > > process of collapsing pages into a transparent huge page?
> > >
> > > If the virtual CPU gets de-scheduled by the host for long
> > > enough, it would be possible for khugepaged to run on
> > > another virtual CPU, and turn the pmd into a THP pmd,
> > > before that VM_BUG_ON test.
> > >
> > > I see that khugepaged takes the mmap_sem for writing in the
> > > collapse code, and it looks like task_numa_work takes the
> > > mmap_sem for reading, so I guess that may not be possible?
> > >
> >
> > mmap_sem will prevent a parallel collapse but what prevents something
> > like the following?
> >
> > do_huge_pmd_wp_page
> > change_pmd_range
> > if (!pmd_trans_huge(*pmd) && pmd_none_or_clear_bad(pmd))
> > continue;
> > pmdp_clear_flush(vma, haddr, pmd);
> > if (pmd_trans_huge(*pmd)) {
> > .... path not taken ....
> > }
> > page_add_new_anon_rmap(new_page, vma, haddr);
> > set_pmd_at(mm, haddr, pmd, entry);
> > VM_BUG_ON(pmd_trans_huge(*pmd));
> >
> > We do not hold the page table lock during the pmd_trans_huge check and we
> > do not recheck it under PTF lock in change_pte_range()
> >
>
> This is a completely untested prototype. It rechecks pmd_trans_huge
> under the lock and falls through if it hit a parallel split. It's not
> perfect because it could decide to fall through just because there was
> no prot_numa work to do but it's for illustration purposes.

Nope, if there was no prot_numa work to do, it returns 1 so the check is
ok. It's only if 0 is returned we need to fall through and really handle
ptes.

--
Mel Gorman
SUSE Labs
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