[PATCH 5.10.y] mm/hugetlb: fix avoid_reserve to allow taking folio from subpool
From: Karl Mehltretter
Date: Sat Sep 26 2026 - 04:05:07 EST
From: Peter Xu <peterx@xxxxxxxxxx>
commit 58db7c5fbe7daa42098d4965133a864f98ba90ba upstream.
Patch series "mm/hugetlb: Refactor hugetlb allocation resv accounting",
v2.
This is a follow up on Ackerley's series here as replacement:
https://lore.kernel.org/r/cover.1728684491.git.ackerleytng@xxxxxxxxxx
The goal of this series is to cleanup hugetlb resv accounting, especially
during folio allocation, to decouple a few things:
- Hugetlb folios v.s. Hugetlbfs: IOW, the hope is in the future hugetlb
folios can be allocated completely without hugetlbfs.
- Decouple VMA v.s. hugetlb folio allocations: allocating a hugetlb folio
should not always require a hugetlbfs VMA. For example, either it got
allocated from the inode level (see hugetlbfs_fallocate() where it used
a pesudo VMA for allocation), or it can be allocated by other kernel
subsystems.
It paves way for other users to allocate hugetlb folios out of either
system reservations, or subpools (instead of hugetlbfs, as a file system).
For longer term, this prepares hugetlb as a separate concept versus
hugetlbfs, so that hugetlb folios can be allocated by not only hugetlbfs
and other things.
Tests I've done:
- I had a reproducer in patch 1 for the bug I found, this will start to
work after patch 1 or the whole set applied.
- Hugetlb regression tests (on x86_64 2MBs), includes:
- All vmtests on hugetlbfs
- libhugetlbfs test suite (which may fail some tests, but no new failures
will be introduced by this series, so all such failures happen before
this series so shouldn't be relevant).
This patch (of 7):
Since commit 04f2cbe35699 ("hugetlb: guarantee that COW faults for a
process that called mmap(MAP_PRIVATE) on hugetlbfs will succeed"),
avoid_reserve was introduced for a special case of CoW on hugetlb private
mappings, and only if the owner VMA is trying to allocate yet another
hugetlb folio that is not reserved within the private vma reserved map.
Later on, in commit d85f69b0b533 ("mm/hugetlb: alloc_huge_page handle
areas hole punched by fallocate"), alloc_huge_page() enforced to not
consume any global reservation as long as avoid_reserve=true. This
operation doesn't look correct, because even if it will enforce the
allocation to not use global reservation at all, it will still try to take
one reservation from the spool (if the subpool existed). Then since the
spool reserved pages take from global reservation, it'll also take one
reservation globally.
Logically it can cause global reservation to go wrong.
I wrote a reproducer below, trigger this special path, and every run of
such program will cause global reservation count to increment by one, until
it hits the number of free pages:
#define _GNU_SOURCE /* See feature_test_macros(7) */
#include <stdio.h>
#include <fcntl.h>
#include <errno.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <sys/mman.h>
#define MSIZE (2UL << 20)
int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
const char *path;
int *buf;
int fd, ret;
pid_t child;
if (argc < 2) {
printf("usage: %s <hugetlb_file>\n", argv[0]);
return -1;
}
path = argv[1];
fd = open(path, O_RDWR | O_CREAT, 0666);
if (fd < 0) {
perror("open failed");
return -1;
}
ret = fallocate(fd, 0, 0, MSIZE);
if (ret != 0) {
perror("fallocate");
return -1;
}
buf = mmap(NULL, MSIZE, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE,
MAP_PRIVATE, fd, 0);
if (buf == MAP_FAILED) {
perror("mmap() failed");
return -1;
}
/* Allocate a page */
*buf = 1;
child = fork();
if (child == 0) {
/* child doesn't need to do anything */
exit(0);
}
/* Trigger CoW from owner */
*buf = 2;
munmap(buf, MSIZE);
close(fd);
unlink(path);
return 0;
}
It can only reproduce with a sub-mount when there're reserved pages on the
spool, like:
# sysctl vm.nr_hugepages=128
# mkdir ./hugetlb-pool
# mount -t hugetlbfs -o min_size=8M,pagesize=2M none ./hugetlb-pool
Then run the reproducer on the mountpoint:
# ./reproducer ./hugetlb-pool/test
Fix it by taking the reservation from spool if available. In general,
avoid_reserve is IMHO more about "avoid vma resv map", not spool's.
I copied stable, however I have no intention for backporting if it's not a
clean cherry-pick, because private hugetlb mapping, and then fork() on top
is too rare to hit.
Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20250107204002.2683356-1-peterx@xxxxxxxxxx
Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20250107204002.2683356-2-peterx@xxxxxxxxxx
Fixes: d85f69b0b533 ("mm/hugetlb: alloc_huge_page handle areas hole punched by fallocate")
Signed-off-by: Peter Xu <peterx@xxxxxxxxxx>
Reviewed-by: Ackerley Tng <ackerleytng@xxxxxxxxxx>
Tested-by: Ackerley Tng <ackerleytng@xxxxxxxxxx>
Reviewed-by: Oscar Salvador <osalvador@xxxxxxx>
Cc: Breno Leitao <leitao@xxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: Muchun Song <muchun.song@xxxxxxxxx>
Cc: Naoya Horiguchi <nao.horiguchi@xxxxxxxxx>
Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: Roman Gushchin <roman.gushchin@xxxxxxxxx>
Cc: <stable@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
[ Karl Mehltretter: The upstream changes map directly to this stable tree's
older page-based HugeTLB API. The backport retains this stable tree's
SetPagePrivate() reserve marker, plain hugetlb_lock calls and direct
-ENOSPC return; the functional changes otherwise match upstream. ]
Assisted-by: LLM
Signed-off-by: Karl Mehltretter <kmehltretter@xxxxxxxxx>
---
Tested against the current linux-5.10.y tip, 5.10.270:
- x86-64 QEMU, 2 MiB HugeTLB pages, at 1 and 4 vCPUs
- compared with the unpatched kernel, an extended version of the commit's
fork/COW reproducer kept the child mapping alive during the parent write
and changed HugePages_Rsvd after program cleanup from 5 to 4 and after
unmount from 1 to 0
- parent/child data isolation passed and no kernel diagnostic was observed
mm/hugetlb.c | 22 +++-------------------
1 file changed, 3 insertions(+), 19 deletions(-)
diff --git a/mm/hugetlb.c b/mm/hugetlb.c
index 70fe6a11daba0..b23c8b2699b58 100644
--- a/mm/hugetlb.c
+++ b/mm/hugetlb.c
@@ -1137,8 +1137,7 @@ static struct page *dequeue_huge_page_nodemask(struct hstate *h, gfp_t gfp_mask,
static struct page *dequeue_huge_page_vma(struct hstate *h,
struct vm_area_struct *vma,
- unsigned long address, int avoid_reserve,
- long chg)
+ unsigned long address, long chg)
{
struct page *page;
struct mempolicy *mpol;
@@ -1155,14 +1154,10 @@ static struct page *dequeue_huge_page_vma(struct hstate *h,
h->free_huge_pages - h->resv_huge_pages == 0)
goto err;
- /* If reserves cannot be used, ensure enough pages are in the pool */
- if (avoid_reserve && h->free_huge_pages - h->resv_huge_pages == 0)
- goto err;
-
gfp_mask = htlb_alloc_mask(h);
nid = huge_node(vma, address, gfp_mask, &mpol, &nodemask);
page = dequeue_huge_page_nodemask(h, gfp_mask, nid, nodemask);
- if (page && !avoid_reserve && vma_has_reserves(vma, chg)) {
+ if (page && vma_has_reserves(vma, chg)) {
SetPagePrivate(page);
h->resv_huge_pages--;
}
@@ -2350,17 +2345,6 @@ struct page *alloc_huge_page(struct vm_area_struct *vma,
vma_end_reservation(h, vma, addr);
return ERR_PTR(-ENOSPC);
}
-
- /*
- * Even though there was no reservation in the region/reserve
- * map, there could be reservations associated with the
- * subpool that can be used. This would be indicated if the
- * return value of hugepage_subpool_get_pages() is zero.
- * However, if avoid_reserve is specified we still avoid even
- * the subpool reservations.
- */
- if (avoid_reserve)
- gbl_chg = 1;
}
/* If this allocation is not consuming a reservation, charge it now.
@@ -2383,7 +2367,7 @@ struct page *alloc_huge_page(struct vm_area_struct *vma,
* from the global free pool (global change). gbl_chg == 0 indicates
* a reservation exists for the allocation.
*/
- page = dequeue_huge_page_vma(h, vma, addr, avoid_reserve, gbl_chg);
+ page = dequeue_huge_page_vma(h, vma, addr, gbl_chg);
if (!page) {
spin_unlock(&hugetlb_lock);
page = alloc_buddy_huge_page_with_mpol(h, vma, addr);
--
2.53.0