Re: [PATCH v2 0/3] mm: reject zone device folios in more folio walkers

[Lance Yang]

On Mon, Aug 17, 2026 at 06:08:07PM -0400, Gregory Price wrote:
>Several LRU-oriented mm walkers resolve the folio backing a PMD entry
>(or a physical pfn) and then reclaim, age, migrate, or lazyfree it
>without ever checking for ZONE_DEVICE memory.
>
>This series adds missing folio_is_zone_device() rejections, matching
>the checks that comparable walkers already perform.
>
>- mm/huge_memory, mm/madvise: the !pmd_present branch above these sites
>  only filters device-private entries (which are non-present).
>
>  A present zone device PMD (e.g. device-coherent) would still reach the
>  folio and be lazyfreed / aged / paged out. Add an explicit check.
>
>- mm/mempolicy: queue_folios_pmd() can see a present zone device PMD
>  (e.g. device-coherent) and queue it for migration.
>
>No crash reproducer - this is a correctness/hardening cleanup found by
>inspection. All checks are placed after the folio is resolved and before
>it is acted upon, on paths that already hold the relevant page-table lock,
>so no locking or refcount changes are involved.

Cool!

Gave the whole series a spin on x86_64 QEMU with a PMD-mapped
device-coherent THP. Without these patches, partial MADV_FREE and
MADV_COLD reliably hit a kernel panic in remove_migration_pte(), while
mbind(MPOL_MF_MOVE | MPOL_MF_STRICT) returned -EIO.

With v2, all three worked fine, PMD mapping stayed intact, and data
checked out :)

Note that both kernels used the same small change to the in-kernel HMM
test driver, allowing its coherent device memory to be allocated as 2 MB
folios so the PMD-mapped test case could be exercised.

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