Re: [PATCH v5 08/14] mm/gup: do not allow zero page for pinned pages

[Pavel Tatashin]

> I was thinking about a use case where userland would pin an address
> without FOLL_WRITE, because the PTE for that address is not going to
> be writable, but some device via DMA will write to it. Now, if we got
> a zero page we have a problem... If this usecase is not valid then the
> fix for movable zero page is make the zero page always come from a
> non-movable zone so we do not need to isolate it during migration, and
> so the memory can be offlined later.

I looked into making zero_page non-movable, and I am confused here.

huge zero page is already not movable:
get_huge_zero_page()
   zero_page = alloc_pages((GFP_TRANSHUGE | __GFP_ZERO) & ~__GFP_MOVABLE, ...

Base zero page can be in a movable zone, which is a bug: if there are
references to zero page, that page cannot be migrated, and we won't be
hot-remove memory area where that page is located. On x86, zero page
should always come from the bottom 4G of physical memory / DMA32 ZONE.

However, I see that sometimes it is not (I reproduce in QEMU emulator):
QEMU instance with 16G of memory and kernelcore=5G

Boot#1:
zero_pfn 48a8d
zero_pfn zone: ZONE_DMA32

Boot#2:
zero_pfn 20168d
zero_pfn zone: ZONE_MOVABLE (???)

The problem is that the x86 zero page comes from the .bss segment:
https://soleen.com/source/xref/linux/arch/x86/kernel/head_64.S?r=31d85460#583

Which, I thought would always be set within the first 4G of physical
memory. What is going on here?

Pasha