[PATCH v2 0/5] Fix device page migration in low memory fallback

From: Matthew Brost

Date: Wed Aug 05 2026 - 15:35:48 EST


LLMs made my breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Not really. They served as an
assistive tool while I performed the debugging, testing, and analysis
needed to isolate the root cause in core MM while fixing a known DRM SVM
issue involving THP allocation failures in the CPU fault-to-device page
migration path.

When a CPU faults on a device private PMD and the driver cannot allocate
a compound destination folio, the source THP has to be split. That path
is broken: the CPU fault reference makes the split always fail, and it
demotes the PMD only in the faulting VMA, leaving any other VMA mapping
the folio pointing a huge PMD at an order-0 page.
The latter is memory corruption, previously masked by the former.

The DRM side had its own problems in the same fallback: there was no
order-0 fallback at all despite a TODO saying one was needed, the error
path computed folio_order() after put_page(), and once the destination
is demoted to order-0 the source page array has to be populated per
page rather than per folio head, or the copy stops after one page.

Validation was performed using xe_exec_system_allocator. The issue was
initially discovered on systems configured with an artificially
constrained memory footprint (mem=8G), where failures occurred
intermittently. Error injection was then introduced to reliably
reproduce the failure condition, enabling thorough validation of the
fix. Results were confirmed through pass/fail A/B testing.

Matt

v2::
- Add assert in 'Fix folio allocation fallback and use-after-put' for
THP placement invariant which Sashiko hallucinated as a bug [1]
- Add 'Clear MIGRATE_PFN_MIGRATE on all sub-folios of a split THP'
(Sashiko)
- Fix checkpatch issues (CI)
- Swap cache issue flagged by Sashiko [1] not fixed as this code doesn't
appear reachable (i.e., dead code). Can address in a follow up if
needed

[1] https://sashiko.dev/#/patchset/20260805113338.3742178-1-matthew.brost%40intel.com

Matthew Brost (5):
mm/migrate_device: Clear MIGRATE_PFN_MIGRATE on all sub-folios of a
split THP
mm/migrate_device: Fix THP splitting of a CPU faulted device private
folio
mm/migrate_device: Apply the fault reference to the correct folio
drm/pagemap: Fix folio allocation fallback and use-after-put
drm/pagemap: Add fault injection for higher-order RAM folio allocation

drivers/gpu/drm/drm_pagemap.c | 164 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++------
mm/migrate_device.c | 129 ++++++++++++++++++++++----
2 files changed, 251 insertions(+), 42 deletions(-)

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2.34.1