In the discussion of Jiaqi Yan's series "Improve hugetlbfs read on HWPOISON hugepages" the race window was discovered. https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/20230616233447.GB7371@monkey/ Freeing a hugetlb page back to low level memory allocators is performed in two steps. 1) Under hugetlb lock, remove page from hugetlb lists and clear destructor 2) Outside lock, allocate vmemmap if necessary and call low level free Between these two steps, the hugetlb page will appear as a normal compound page. However, vmemmap for tail pages could be missing. If a memory error occurs at this time, we could try to update page flags non-existant page structs. A much more detailed description is in the first patch. The first patch addresses the race window. However, it adds a hugetlb_lock lock/unlock cycle to every vmemmap optimized hugetlb page free operation. This could lead to slowdowns if one is freeing a large number of hugetlb pages. The second path optimizes the update_and_free_pages_bulk routine to only take the lock once in bulk operations. The second patch is technically not a bug fix, but includes a Fixes tag and Cc stable to avoid a performance regression. It can be combined with the first, but was done separately make reviewing easier. Mike Kravetz (2): hugetlb: Do not clear hugetlb dtor until allocating vmemmap hugetlb: optimize update_and_free_pages_bulk to avoid lock cycles mm/hugetlb.c | 110 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++------------ 1 file changed, 85 insertions(+), 25 deletions(-) -- 2.41.0
