Re: [PATCH v2] mm: thp: fix potential clearing to referenced flag in page_idle_clear_pte_refs_one()

From: Andrew Morton
Date: Fri Feb 09 2018 - 15:43:06 EST


On Sat, 10 Feb 2018 03:12:01 +0800 Yang Shi <yang.shi@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> For PTE-mapped THP, the compound THP has not been split to normal 4K
> pages yet, the whole THP is considered referenced if any one of sub
> page is referenced.
>
> When walking PTE-mapped THP by pvmw, all relevant PTEs will be checked
> to retrieve referenced bit. But, the current code just returns the
> result of the last PTE. If the last PTE has not referenced, the
> referenced flag will be cleared.
>
> Just did logical OR for referenced to get the correct result.
>
> Reported-by: Gang Deng <gavin.dg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Suggested-by: Kirill A. Shutemov <kirill.shutemov@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Signed-off-by: Yang Shi <yang.shi@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> ---
> v2: adopted the suggestion from Kirill. Not use "||=" style to keep checkpatch
> quiet, otherwise it reports ERROR: spaces required around that '||'
>
> mm/page_idle.c | 12 ++++++++----
> 1 file changed, 8 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-)
>
> diff --git a/mm/page_idle.c b/mm/page_idle.c
> index 0a49374..a4baec9 100644
> --- a/mm/page_idle.c
> +++ b/mm/page_idle.c
> @@ -65,11 +65,15 @@ static bool page_idle_clear_pte_refs_one(struct page *page,
> while (page_vma_mapped_walk(&pvmw)) {
> addr = pvmw.address;
> if (pvmw.pte) {
> - referenced = ptep_clear_young_notify(vma, addr,
> - pvmw.pte);
> + /*
> + * For PTE-mapped THP, one sub page is referenced,
> + * the whole THP is referenced.
> + */
> + referenced = referenced || ptep_clear_young_notify(vma,
> + addr, pvmw.pte);

That doesn't work. If `referenced' is already true,
ptep_clear_young_notify() will not be called.

if (ptep_clear_young_notify(...))
referenced = true;

would suit.


It makes me wonder what difference this bug makes and why that
difference was not noted in your testing. Any theories about that?
How can we design a test which *will* make this error apparent?