Re: [PATCH] mm: zswap: add VM_BUG_ON() if large folio swapin is attempted

[Yosry Ahmed]

On Thu, Jun 6, 2024 at 1:22 PM David Hildenbrand <david@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On 06.06.24 20:48, Yosry Ahmed wrote:
> > With ongoing work to support large folio swapin, it is important to make
> > sure we do not pass large folios to zswap_load() without implementing
> > proper support.
> >
> > For example, if a swapin fault observes that contiguous PTEs are
> > pointing to contiguous swap entries and tries to swap them in as a large
> > folio, swap_read_folio() will pass in a large folio to zswap_load(), but
> > zswap_load() will only effectively load the first page in the folio. If
> > the first page is not in zswap, the folio will be read from disk, even
> > though other pages may be in zswap.
> >
> > In both cases, this will lead to silent data corruption.
> >
> > Proper large folio swapin support needs to go into zswap before zswap
> > can be enabled in a system that supports large folio swapin.
> >
> > Looking at callers of swap_read_folio(), it seems like they are either
> > allocated from __read_swap_cache_async() or do_swap_page() in the
> > SWP_SYNCHRONOUS_IO path. Both of which allocate order-0 folios, so we
> > are fine for now.
> >
> > Add a VM_BUG_ON() in zswap_load() to make sure that we detect changes in
> > the order of those allocations without proper handling of zswap.
> >
> > Alternatively, swap_read_folio() (or its callers) can be updated to have
> > a fallback mechanism that splits large folios or reads subpages
> > separately. Similar logic may be needed anyway in case part of a large
> > folio is already in the swapcache and the rest of it is swapped out.
> >
> > Signed-off-by: Yosry Ahmed <yosryahmed@xxxxxxxxxx>
> > ---
> >
> > Sorry for the long CC list, I just found myself repeatedly looking at
> > new series that add swap support for mTHPs / large folios, making sure
> > they do not break with zswap or make incorrect assumptions. This debug
> > check should give us some peace of mind. Hopefully this patch will also
> > raise awareness among people who are working on this.
> >
> > ---
> >   mm/zswap.c | 3 +++
> >   1 file changed, 3 insertions(+)
> >
> > diff --git a/mm/zswap.c b/mm/zswap.c
> > index b9b35ef86d9be..6007252429bb2 100644
> > --- a/mm/zswap.c
> > +++ b/mm/zswap.c
> > @@ -1577,6 +1577,9 @@ bool zswap_load(struct folio *folio)
> >       if (!entry)
> >               return false;
> >
> > +     /* Zswap loads do not handle large folio swapins correctly yet */
> > +     VM_BUG_ON(folio_test_large(folio));
> > +
>
> There is no way we could have a WARN_ON_ONCE() and recover, right?

Not without making more fundamental changes to the surrounding swap
code. Currently zswap_load() returns either true (folio was loaded
from zswap) or false (folio is not in zswap).

To handle this correctly zswap_load() would need to tell
swap_read_folio() which subpages are in zswap and have been loaded,
and then swap_read_folio() would need to read the remaining subpages
from disk. This of course assumes that the caller of swap_read_folio()
made sure that the entire folio is swapped out and protected against
races with other swapins.

Also, because swap_read_folio() cannot split the folio itself, other
swap_read_folio_*() functions that are called from it should be
updated to handle swapping in tail subpages, which may be questionable
in its own right.

An alternative would be that zswap_load() (or a separate interface)
could tell swap_read_folio() that the folio is partially in zswap,
then we can just bail and tell the caller that it cannot read the
large folio and that it should be split.

There may be other options as well, but the bottom line is that it is
possible, but probably not something that we want to do right now.

A stronger protection method would be to introduce a config option or
boot parameter for large folio swapin, and then make CONFIG_ZSWAP
depend on it being disabled, or have zswap check it at boot and refuse
to be enabled if it is on.