On 07/20/2012 09:49 AM, Mel Gorman wrote:
This V2 is still the mmap_sem approach that fixes a potential deadlock problem pointed out by Michal.
Larry and I were looking around the hugetlb code some more, and found what looks like yet another race. In hugetlb_no_page, we have the following code: spin_lock(&mm->page_table_lock); size = i_size_read(mapping->host) >> huge_page_shift(h); if (idx >= size) goto backout; ret = 0; if (!huge_pte_none(huge_ptep_get(ptep))) goto backout; if (anon_rmap) hugepage_add_new_anon_rmap(page, vma, address); else page_dup_rmap(page); new_pte = make_huge_pte(vma, page, ((vma->vm_flags & VM_WRITE) && (vma->vm_flags & VM_SHARED))); set_huge_pte_at(mm, address, ptep, new_pte); ... spin_unlock(&mm->page_table_lock); Notice how we check !huge_pte_none with our own mm->page_table_lock held. This offers no protection at all against other processes, that also hold their own page_table_lock. In short, it looks like it is possible for multiple processes to go through the above code simultaneously, potentially resulting in: 1) one process overwriting the pte just created by another process 2) data corruption, as one partially written page gets superceded by an newly zeroed page, but no TLB invalidates get sent to other CPUs 3) a memory leak of a huge page Is there anything that would make this race impossible, or is this a real bug? If so, are there more like it in the hugetlbfs code? -- 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>