While working on s390 support for gigantic hugepages I ran into the following "Bad page state" warning when freeing gigantic pages: BUG: Bad page state in process bash pfn:580001 page:000003d116000040 count:0 mapcount:0 mapping:ffffffff00000000 index:0x0 flags: 0x7fffc0000000000() page dumped because: non-NULL mapping This is because page->compound_mapcount, which is part of a union with page->mapping, is initialized with -1 in prep_compound_gigantic_page(), and not cleared again during destroy_compound_gigantic_page(). Fix this by clearing the compound_mapcount in destroy_compound_gigantic_page() before clearing compound_head. Interestingly enough, the warning will not show up on x86_64, although this should not be architecture specific. Apparently there is an endianness issue, combined with the fact that the union contains both a 64 bit ->mapping pointer and a 32 bit atomic_t ->compound_mapcount as members. The resulting bogus page->mapping on x86_64 therefore contains 00000000ffffffff instead of ffffffff00000000 on s390, which will falsely trigger the PageAnon() check in free_pages_prepare() because page->mapping & PAGE_MAPPING_ANON is true on little-endian architectures like x86_64 in this case (the page is not compound anymore, ->compound_head was already cleared before). As a result, page->mapping will be cleared before doing the checks in free_pages_check(). Not sure if the bogus "PageAnon() returning true" on x86_64 for the first tail page of a gigantic page (at this stage) has other theoretical implications, but they would also be fixed with this patch. Signed-off-by: Gerald Schaefer <gerald.schaefer@xxxxxxxxxx> --- mm/hugetlb.c | 1 + 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+) diff --git a/mm/hugetlb.c b/mm/hugetlb.c index e197cd7..b64f8b7 100644 --- a/mm/hugetlb.c +++ b/mm/hugetlb.c @@ -1030,6 +1030,7 @@ static void destroy_compound_gigantic_page(struct page *page, int nr_pages = 1 << order; struct page *p = page + 1; + atomic_set(compound_mapcount_ptr(page), 0); for (i = 1; i < nr_pages; i++, p = mem_map_next(p, page, i)) { clear_compound_head(p); set_page_refcounted(p); -- 2.6.6 -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@xxxxxxxxx. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@xxxxxxxxx"> email@xxxxxxxxx </a>