Derrick reports that in some cases where pread() would fail with -EIO and mmap()+access would generate a SIGBUS signal, MADV_POPULATE_READ / MADV_POPULATE_WRITE will keep retrying forever and not fail with -EFAULT. It all boils down to missing VM_FAULT_RETRY handling. Let's try to handle that in a better way, similar to how ordinary GUP handles it. Details in patch #1. In short, move special MADV_POPULATE_(READ|WRITE) VMA handling into __get_user_pages(), and make faultin_page_range() call __get_user_pages_locked(), which handles VM_FAULT_RETRY. Further, avoid the now-useless madvise VMA walk, because __get_user_pages() will perform the VMA lookup either way. I briefly played with handling the FOLL_MADV_POPULATE checks in __get_user_pages() a bit differently, integrating them with existing handling, but it ended up looking worse. So I decided to keep it simple. Likely, we need better selftests, but the reproducer from Darrick might be a bit hard to convert into a simple selftest. Note that using mlock() in Darricks reproducer results in a similar endless retry. Likely, that is not what we want, and we should handle VM_FAULT_RETRY in populate_vma_page_range() / __mm_populate() as well. However, similarly using __get_user_pages_locked() might be more complicated, because of the advanced VMA handling in populate_vma_page_range(). Further, most populate_vma_page_range() callers simply ignore the return values, so it's unclear in which cases we expect to just silently fail, or where we'd want to retry+fail or endlessly retry instead. Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Cc: Darrick J. Wong <djwong@xxxxxxxxxx> Cc: John Hubbard <jhubbard@xxxxxxxxxx> Cc: Jason Gunthorpe <jgg@xxxxxxxxxx> Cc: Hugh Dickins <hughd@xxxxxxxxxx> David Hildenbrand (2): mm/madvise: make MADV_POPULATE_(READ|WRITE) handle VM_FAULT_RETRY properly mm/madvise: don't perform madvise VMA walk for MADV_POPULATE_(READ|WRITE) mm/gup.c | 54 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++--------------------- mm/internal.h | 10 ++++++---- mm/madvise.c | 43 +++++++++++++--------------------------- 3 files changed, 52 insertions(+), 55 deletions(-) base-commit: f48159f866f422371bb1aad10eb4d05b29ca4d8c -- 2.43.2