Re: [PATCH v1 1/4] mm/hugetlb: fix hugetlb_pmd_shared()

From: David Hildenbrand (Red Hat)

Date: Mon Dec 08 2025 - 06:02:52 EST


On 12/8/25 03:32, Lance Yang wrote:
From: Lance Yang <lance.yang@xxxxxxxxx>


On Fri, 5 Dec 2025 22:35:55 +0100, David Hildenbrand (Red Hat) wrote:
We switched from (wrongly) using the page count to an independent
shared count. Now, shared page tables have a refcount of 1 (excluding
speculative references) and instead use ptdesc->pt_share_count to
identify sharing.

We didn't convert hugetlb_pmd_shared(), so right now, we would never
detect a shared PMD table as such, because sharing/unsharing no longer
touches the refcount of a PMD table.

Page migration, like mbind() or migrate_pages() would allow for migrating
folios mapped into such shared PMD tables, even though the folios are
not exclusive. In smaps we would account them as "private" although they
are "shared", and we would be wrongly setting the PM_MMAP_EXCLUSIVE in the
pagemap interface.

Fix it by properly using ptdesc_pmd_is_shared() in hugetlb_pmd_shared().

Fixes: 59d9094df3d7 ("mm: hugetlb: independent PMD page table shared count")
Cc: <stable@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: Liu Shixin <liushixin2@xxxxxxxxxx>
Signed-off-by: David Hildenbrand (Red Hat) <david@xxxxxxxxxx>
---

Tested on x86 with two independent processes sharing a 1GiB hugetlbfs file
(aligned a 1GiB boundary).

Before the fix, even though PMD sharing worked (pt_share_count=1),
hugetlb_pmd_shared() returned false because page_count() was still 1,
causing smaps to report it as "Private" and pagemap to set it
PM_MMAP_EXCLUSIVE incorrectly :(

After the fix, hugetlb_pmd_shared() correctly detects the sharing, smaps
reports it as "Shared", and PM_MMAP_EXCLUSIVE is cleared ;)

Tested-by: Lance Yang <lance.yang@xxxxxxxxx>

Thanks a lot Lance for the testing and thanks to everybody for the review!

--
Cheers

David