[PATCH 00/10] Hwpoison soft-offline rework

From: Oscar Salvador
Date: Tue Sep 10 2019 - 06:31:27 EST



This patchset was based on Naoya's hwpoison rework [1], so thanks to him
for the initial work.

This patchset aims to fix some issues laying in soft-offline handling,
but it also takes the chance and takes some further steps to perform
cleanups and some refactoring as well.

- Motivation:

A customer and I were facing an issue where poisoned pages we returned
back to user-space after having offlined them properly.
This was only seend under some memory stress + soft offlining pages.
After some anaylsis, it became clear that the problem was that
when kcompactd kicked in to migrate pages over, compaction_alloc
callback was handing poisoned pages to the migrate routine.
Once this page was later on fault in, __do_page_fault returned
VM_FAULT_HWPOISON making the process being killed.

All this could happen because isolate_freepages_block and
fast_isolate_freepages just check for the page to be PageBuddy,
and since 1) poisoned pages can be part of a higher order page
and 2) poisoned pages are also Page Buddy, they can sneak in easily.

I also saw some problem with swap pages, but I suspected to be the
same sort of problem, so I did not follow that trace.

The full explanation can be see in [2].

- Approach:

The taken approach is to not let poisoned pages hit neither
pcplists nor buddy freelists.
This is achieved by:

In-use pages:

* Normal pages

1) do not release the last reference count after the
invalidation/migration of the page.
2) the page is being handed to page_set_poison, which does:
2a) sets PageHWPoison flag
2b) calls put_page (only to be able to call __page_cache_release)
Since poisoned pages are skipped in free_pages_prepare,
this put_page is safe.
2c) Sets the refcount to 1

* Hugetlb pages

1) Hand the page to page_set_poison after migration
2) page_set_poison does:
2a) Calls dissolve_free_huge_page
2b) If ranged to be dissolved contains poisoned pages,
we free the rangeas order-0 pages (as we do with gigantic hugetlb page),
so free_pages_prepare will skip them accordingly.
2c) Sets the refcount to 1

Free pages:

* Normal pages:

1) Take the page off the buddy freelist
2) Set PageHWPoison flag and set refcount to 1

* Hugetlb pages

1) Try to allocate a new hugetlb page to the pool
2) Take off the pool the poisoned hugetlb


With this patchset, I no longer see the issues I faced before.

Note:
I presented this as RFC to open discussion of the taken aproach.
I think that furthers cleanups and refactors could be made, but I would
like to get some insight of the taken approach before touching more
code.

Thanks

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/1541746035-13408-1-git-send-email-n-horiguchi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx/
[2] https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/20190826104144.GA7849@linux/T/#u

Naoya Horiguchi (5):
mm,hwpoison: cleanup unused PageHuge() check
mm,madvise: call soft_offline_page() without MF_COUNT_INCREASED
mm,hwpoison-inject: don't pin for hwpoison_filter
mm,hwpoison: remove MF_COUNT_INCREASED
mm: remove flag argument from soft offline functions

Oscar Salvador (5):
mm,hwpoison: Unify THP handling for hard and soft offline
mm,hwpoison: Rework soft offline for in-use pages
mm,hwpoison: Refactor soft_offline_huge_page and __soft_offline_page
mm,hwpoison: Rework soft offline for free pages
mm,hwpoison: Use hugetlb_replace_page to replace free hugetlb pages

drivers/base/memory.c | 2 +-
include/linux/mm.h | 9 +-
include/linux/page-flags.h | 5 -
mm/hugetlb.c | 51 +++++++-
mm/hwpoison-inject.c | 18 +--
mm/madvise.c | 25 ++--
mm/memory-failure.c | 319 +++++++++++++++++++++------------------------
mm/migrate.c | 11 +-
mm/page_alloc.c | 62 +++++++--
9 files changed, 267 insertions(+), 235 deletions(-)

--
2.12.3