Re: [PATCH] mm: khugepaged: fix memory leak in collapse_file rollback path

From: David Hildenbrand (Red Hat)
Date: Mon Nov 24 2025 - 05:02:51 EST


On 11/23/25 14:27, Shardul Bankar wrote:
When collapse_file() fails after xas_create_range() succeeds, the
rollback path does not clean up pre-allocated XArray nodes stored in
xas->xa_alloc. These nodes are allocated by xas_nomem() when
xas_create() fails with GFP_NOWAIT and need to be freed.

The leak occurs because:
1. xas_create_range() may call xas_nomem() which allocates a node
and stores it in xas->xa_alloc

Do you mean that, if xas_create_range() failed, collapse_file() will call xas_nomem() to preallocate memory?

I don't immediately see how xas_create_range() would call xas_nomem().

2. If the collapse operation fails later, the rollback path jumps
to the 'rollback:' label
3. The rollback path cleans up folios but does not call xas_destroy()
to free the pre-allocated nodes in xas->xa_alloc

Note that after we call xas_nomem(), we retry xas_create_range() -- that previously failed to to -ENOMEM.

So the assumption is that the xas_create_range() call would consume that memory.

I'm sure there is some corner case where it is not the case (some concurrent action? not sure)


Fix this by calling xas_destroy(&xas) at the beginning of the rollback
path to free any pre-allocated nodes. This is safe because xas_destroy()
only frees nodes in xas->xa_alloc that were never inserted into the
XArray tree.

Shouldn't we just call xas_destroy() in any case, also when everything succeeded?

--
Cheers

David