Pte_special broken on Xen PV when NUMA balancing is enabled

From: Wei Liu
Date: Wed Nov 05 2014 - 11:41:52 EST


Hi all

I'm developing virtual NUMA support for Xen. One thing I notice is that when
NUMA balancing is enabled, kernel will crash with following backtrace.

[ 404.281396] CPU: 0 PID: 1058 Comm: dd Tainted: G B W 3.18.0-rc3-bp+ #3
[ 404.281403] 0000000000000000 00007fd62eca3000 ffffffff817b7cac ffff880172d298b8
[ 404.281415] ffffffff8110383f 0720072007300732 00000007fd62eca3 0720072007200720
[ 404.281426] ffff880172d298b8 ffff88017300bbb0 00007fd62eca3000 0000000000000000
[ 404.281437] Call Trace:
[ 404.281444] [<ffffffff817b7cac>] ? dump_stack+0x41/0x51
[ 404.281452] [<ffffffff8110383f>] ? print_bad_pte+0x19f/0x1cb
[ 404.281460] [<ffffffff81104479>] ? vm_normal_page+0x51/0x87
[ 404.281469] [<ffffffff8110c5ef>] ? change_protection+0x4fb/0x76a
[ 404.281477] [<ffffffff81106435>] ? handle_mm_fault+0x9e0/0xa11
[ 404.281486] [<ffffffff8111cc22>] ? change_prot_numa+0x13/0x24
[ 404.281495] [<ffffffff8106abf0>] ? task_numa_work+0x20c/0x2ac
[ 404.281503] [<ffffffff810615e7>] ? finish_task_switch+0x83/0xc5
[ 404.281512] [<ffffffff8105af10>] ? task_work_run+0x7b/0x8f
[ 404.281521] [<ffffffff8100d732>] ? do_notify_resume+0x5a/0x6d
[ 404.281529] [<ffffffff817bf49f>] ? retint_signal+0x48/0x89
[ 404.281537] [<ffffffff810012eb>] ? xen_hypercall_iret+0xb/0x20

Decoding page flags 0x366 we have _PAGE_SPECIAL(_PAGE_NUMA) and
_PAGE_GLOBAL(_PAGE_PROTNONE) set, _PAGE_PRESENT not set. It's handling
a NUMA hint page fault and crashes because the PTE in question is
considered a special PTE by pte_special.

In a Xen PV guest, _PAGE_GLOBAL is added by hypervisor to mark the page
a guest user space page. Xen PV kernel has already forbidden setting
that bit during initialisation. It's a bit unfortunate that there's
still clash with _PAGE_PROTNONE.

Wei.

P.S. Interestingly, in b38af4721 ("x86,mm: fix pte_special versus
pte_numa"), the commit which changed pte_special, Hugh (the author)
wrote "It still appears that this patch may be incomplete: aren't there
other places which need to be handling PROTNONE along with PRESENT?"
Looks like now we have a case -- Xen PV -- that PROTNONE and PRESENT
co-exist.
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