While investigating HVO for THPs [1], it turns out that speculative PFN
walkers like compaction can race with vmemmap modifications, e.g.,
CPU 1 (vmemmap modifier) CPU 2 (speculative PFN walker)
------------------------------- ------------------------------
Allocates an LRU folio page1
Sees page1
Frees page1
Allocates a hugeTLB folio page2
(page1 being a tail of page2)
Updates vmemmap mapping page1
get_page_unless_zero(page1)
Even though page1->_refcount is zero after HVO, get_page_unless_zero() can
still try to modify this read-only field, resulting in a crash.
An independent report [2] confirmed this race.
There are two discussed approaches to fix this race:
1. Make RO vmemmap RW so that get_page_unless_zero() can fail without
triggering a PF.
2. Use RCU to make sure get_page_unless_zero() either sees zero
page->_refcount through the old vmemmap or non-zero page->_refcount
through the new one.
The second approach is preferred here because:
1. It can prevent illegal modifications to struct page[] that has been
HVO'ed;
2. It can be generalized, in a way similar to ZERO_PAGE(), to fix
similar races in other places, e.g., arch_remove_memory() on x86
[3], which frees vmemmap mapping offlined struct page[].
While adding synchronize_rcu(), the goal is to be surgical, rather than
optimized. Specifically, calls to synchronize_rcu() on the error handling
paths can be coalesced, but it is not done for the sake of Simplicity:
noticeably, this fix removes ~50% more lines than it adds.
According to the hugetlb_optimize_vmemmap section in
Documentation/admin-guide/sysctl/vm.rst, enabling HVO makes allocating or
freeing hugeTLB pages "~2x slower than before". Having synchronize_rcu()
on top makes those operations even worse, and this also affects the user
interface /proc/sys/vm/nr_overcommit_hugepages.
This is *very* hard to trigger:
1. Most hugeTLB use cases I know of are static, i.e., reserved at
boot time, because allocating at runtime is not reliable at all.
2. On top of that, someone has to be very unlucky to get tripped
over above, because the race window is so small -- I wasn't able to
trigger it with a stress testing that does nothing but that (with
THPs though).
[1] https://lore.kernel.org/20240229183436.4110845-4-yuzhao@google.com/
[2] https://lore.kernel.org/917FFC7F-0615-44DD-90EE-9F85F8EA9974@linux.dev/
[3] https://lore.kernel.org/be130a96-a27e-4240-ad78-776802f57cad@redhat.com/
Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20240627222705.2974207-1-yuzhao@google.com
Signed-off-by: Yu Zhao <yuzhao@google.com>
Acked-by: Muchun Song <muchun.song@linux.dev>
Cc: David Hildenbrand <david@redhat.com>
Cc: Frank van der Linden <fvdl@google.com>
Cc: Matthew Wilcox (Oracle) <willy@infradead.org>
Cc: Peter Xu <peterx@redhat.com>
Cc: Yang Shi <yang@os.amperecomputing.com>
Cc: Yu Zhao <yuzhao@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
bd225530a4