This is a note to let you know that I've just added the patch titled xfs: clear _XBF_PAGES from buffers when readahead page to the 4.4-stable tree which can be found at: http://www.kernel.org/git/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/stable-queue.git;a=summary The filename of the patch is: xfs-clear-_xbf_pages-from-buffers-when-readahead-page.patch and it can be found in the queue-4.4 subdirectory. If you, or anyone else, feels it should not be added to the stable tree, please let <stable@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> know about it. >From 2aa6ba7b5ad3189cc27f14540aa2f57f0ed8df4b Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: "Darrick J. Wong" <darrick.wong@xxxxxxxxxx> Date: Wed, 25 Jan 2017 20:24:57 -0800 Subject: xfs: clear _XBF_PAGES from buffers when readahead page From: Darrick J. Wong <darrick.wong@xxxxxxxxxx> commit 2aa6ba7b5ad3189cc27f14540aa2f57f0ed8df4b upstream. If we try to allocate memory pages to back an xfs_buf that we're trying to read, it's possible that we'll be so short on memory that the page allocation fails. For a blocking read we'll just wait, but for readahead we simply dump all the pages we've collected so far. Unfortunately, after dumping the pages we neglect to clear the _XBF_PAGES state, which means that the subsequent call to xfs_buf_free thinks that b_pages still points to pages we own. It then double-frees the b_pages pages. This results in screaming about negative page refcounts from the memory manager, which xfs oughtn't be triggering. To reproduce this case, mount a filesystem where the size of the inodes far outweighs the availalble memory (a ~500M inode filesystem on a VM with 300MB memory did the trick here) and run bulkstat in parallel with other memory eating processes to put a huge load on the system. The "check summary" phase of xfs_scrub also works for this purpose. Signed-off-by: Darrick J. Wong <darrick.wong@xxxxxxxxxx> Reviewed-by: Eric Sandeen <sandeen@xxxxxxxxxx> Cc: Ivan Kozik <ivan@xxxxxxxxxx> Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> --- fs/xfs/xfs_buf.c | 1 + 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+) --- a/fs/xfs/xfs_buf.c +++ b/fs/xfs/xfs_buf.c @@ -375,6 +375,7 @@ retry: out_free_pages: for (i = 0; i < bp->b_page_count; i++) __free_page(bp->b_pages[i]); + bp->b_flags &= ~_XBF_PAGES; return error; } Patches currently in stable-queue which might be from darrick.wong@xxxxxxxxxx are queue-4.4/xfs-don-t-allow-di_size-with-high-bit-set.patch queue-4.4/xfs-clear-_xbf_pages-from-buffers-when-readahead-page.patch