Re: [PATCH 1/1] mm: compaction: avoid fast_isolate_around() to set pageblock_skip on reserved pages

From: Vlastimil Babka
Date: Wed Nov 25 2020 - 07:08:58 EST


On 11/25/20 6:34 AM, Andrea Arcangeli wrote:
Hello,

On Mon, Nov 23, 2020 at 02:01:16PM +0100, Vlastimil Babka wrote:
On 11/21/20 8:45 PM, Andrea Arcangeli wrote:
> A corollary issue was fixed in
> 39639000-39814fff : Unknown E820 type
> > pfn 0x7a200 -> 0x7a200000 min_pfn hit non-RAM:
> > 7a17b000-7a216fff : Unknown E820 type

It would be nice to also provide a /proc/zoneinfo and how exactly the "zone_spans_pfn" was violated. I assume we end up below zone's start_pfn, but is it true?

Agreed, I was about to grab that info along with all page struct
around the pfn 0x7a200 and phys address 0x7a216fff.

# grep -A1 E820 /proc/iomem
7a17b000-7a216fff : Unknown E820 type
7a217000-7bffffff : System RAM

DMA zone_start_pfn 1 zone_end_pfn() 4096 contiguous 1
DMA32 zone_start_pfn 4096 zone_end_pfn() 1048576 contiguous 0
Normal zone_start_pfn 1048576 zone_end_pfn() 4715392 contiguous 1
Movable zone_start_pfn 0 zone_end_pfn() 0 contiguous 0

So the above means that around the "Unknown E820 type" we have:

pfn 499712 - start of pageblock in ZONE_DMA32
pfn 500091 - start of the "Unknown E820 type" range
pfn 500224 - start of another pageblock
pfn 500246 - end of "Unknown E820 type"

So this is indeed not a zone boundary issue, but basically a hole not aligned to pageblock boundary and really unexpected.
We have CONFIG_HOLES_IN_ZONE (that x86 doesn't set) for architectures that do this, and even that config only affects pfn_valid_within(). But here pfn_valid() is true, but the zone/node linkage is unexpected.

However the real bug seems that reserved pages have a zero zone_id in
the page->flags when it should have the real zone id/nid. The patch I
sent earlier to validate highest would only be needed to deal with
pfn_valid.

Something must have changed more recently than v5.1 that caused the
zoneid of reserved pages to be wrong, a possible candidate for the
real would be this change below:

+ __init_single_page(pfn_to_page(pfn), pfn, 0, 0);

Even if it may not be it, at the light of how the reserved page
zoneid/nid initialized went wrong, the above line like it's too flakey
to stay.

It'd be preferable if the pfn_valid fails and the
pfn_to_section_nr(pfn) returns an invalid section for the intermediate
step. Even better memset 0xff over the whole page struct until the
second stage comes around.

Whenever pfn_valid is true, it's better that the zoneid/nid is correct
all times, otherwise if the second stage fails we end up in a bug with
weird side effects.

Yeah I guess it would be simpler if zoneid/nid was correct for pfn_valid() pfns within a zone's range, even if they are reserved due not not being really usable memory.

I don't think we want to introduce CONFIG_HOLES_IN_ZONE to x86. If the chosen solution is to make this to a real hole, the hole should be extended to MAX_ORDER_NR_PAGES aligned boundaries.

In any case, compaction code can't fix this with better range checks.

Maybe it's not the above that left a zero zoneid though, I haven't
tried to bisect it yet to look how the page->flags looked like on a
older kernel that didn't seem to reproduce this crash, I'm just
guessing.

Thanks,
Andrea