[PATCH] mm: hugetlb: avoid soft lockup when mprotect with PROT_MTE

Yang Shi
2025-09-26T16:21:04Z

When calling mprotect() with PROT_MTE, kernel will initialize MTE tags
for every single page in the affected area. Soft lockup was observed
when doing this for large HugeTLB memory area in our customer's workload
(~300GB memory):

watchdog: BUG: soft lockup - CPU#98 stuck for 23s! [t2_new_sysv:126916]

CPU: 98 PID: 126916 Comm: t2_new_sysv Kdump: loaded Not tainted 6.17-rc7
Hardware name: GIGACOMPUTING R2A3-T40-AAV1/Jefferson CIO, BIOS 5.4.4.1 07/15/2025
pstate: 20400009 (nzCv daif +PAN -UAO -TCO -DIT -SSBS BTYPE=--)
pc : mte_clear_page_tags+0x14/0x24
lr : mte_sync_tags+0x1c0/0x240
sp : ffff80003150bb80
x29: ffff80003150bb80 x28: ffff00739e9705a8 x27: 0000ffd2d6a00000
x26: 0000ff8e4bc00000 x25: 00e80046cde00f45 x24: 0000000000022458
x23: 0000000000000000 x22: 0000000000000004 x21: 000000011b380000
x20: ffff000000000000 x19: 000000011b379f40 x18: 0000000000000000
x17: 0000000000000000 x16: 0000000000000000 x15: 0000000000000000
x14: 0000000000000000 x13: 0000000000000000 x12: 0000000000000000
x11: 0000000000000000 x10: 0000000000000000 x9 : ffffc875e0aa5e2c
x8 : 0000000000000000 x7 : 0000000000000000 x6 : 0000000000000000
x5 : fffffc01ce7a5c00 x4 : 00000000046cde00 x3 : fffffc0000000000
x2 : 0000000000000004 x1 : 0000000000000040 x0 : ffff0046cde7c000

Call trace:
mte_clear_page_tags+0x14/0x24
set_huge_pte_at+0x25c/0x280
hugetlb_change_protection+0x220/0x430
change_protection+0x5c/0x8c
mprotect_fixup+0x10c/0x294
do_mprotect_pkey.constprop.0+0x2e0/0x3d4
__arm64_sys_mprotect+0x24/0x44
invoke_syscall+0x50/0x160
el0_svc_common+0x48/0x144
do_el0_svc+0x30/0xe0
el0_svc+0x30/0xf0
el0t_64_sync_handler+0xc4/0x148
el0t_64_sync+0x1a4/0x1a8

Soft lockup is not triggered with THP or base page because there is
cond_resched() called for each PMD size.

So add cond_resched() for hugetlb to avoid soft lockup.

Fixes: 25c17c4b55de ("hugetlb: arm64: add mte support")
Tested-by: Carl Worth <carl@os.amperecomputing.com>
Signed-off-by: Yang Shi <yang@os.amperecomputing.com>
---
mm/hugetlb.c | 2 ++
1 file changed, 2 insertions(+)

diff --git a/mm/hugetlb.c b/mm/hugetlb.c
index cb5c4e79e0b8..fe6606d91b31 100644
--- a/mm/hugetlb.c
+++ b/mm/hugetlb.c
@@ -7242,6 +7242,8 @@ long hugetlb_change_protection(struct vm_area_struct *vma,
psize);
}
spin_unlock(ptl);
+
+ cond_resched();
}
/*
* Must flush TLB before releasing i_mmap_rwsem: x86's huge_pmd_unshare
--
2.47.0