Re: [PATCH] arm64: mm: hugetlb: add support for free vmemmap pages of HugeTLB

Mark Rutland
2022-01-12T12:03:27Z

Hi,

On Tue, Jan 11, 2022 at 09:16:52PM +0800, Muchun Song wrote:
> The preparation of supporting freeing vmemmap associated with each
> HugeTLB page is ready, so we can support this feature for arm64.
>
> Signed-off-by: Muchun Song <songmuchun@bytedance.com>

It's a bit difficult to understand this commit message, as there's not much
context here.

What is HUGETLB_PAGE_FREE_VMEMMAP intended to achieve? Is this intended to save
memory, find bugs, or some other goal? If this is a memory saving or
performance improvement, can we quantify that benefit?

Does the alloc/free happen dynamically, or does this happen once during kernel
boot? IIUC it's the former, which sounds pretty scary. Especially if we need to
re-allocate the vmmemmap pages later -- can't we run out of memory, and then
fail to free a HugeTLB page?

Are there any requirements upon arch code, e.g. mutual exclusion?

Below there are a bunch of comments trying to explain that this is safe. Having
some of that rationale in the commit message itself would be helpful.

I see that commit:

6be24bed9da367c2 ("mm: hugetlb: introduce a new config HUGETLB_PAGE_FREE_VMEMMAP")

... has a much more complete description, and cribbing some of that wording
would be helpful.

> ---
> There is already some discussions about this in [1], but there was no
> conclusion in the end. I copied the concern proposed by Anshuman to here.
>
> 1st concern:
> "
> But what happens when a hot remove section's vmemmap area (which is being
> teared down) is nearby another vmemmap area which is either created or
> being destroyed for HugeTLB alloc/free purpose. As you mentioned HugeTLB
> pages inside the hot remove section might be safe. But what about other
> HugeTLB areas whose vmemmap area shares page table entries with vmemmap
> entries for a section being hot removed ? Massive HugeTLB alloc/use/free
> test cycle using memory just adjacent to a memory hotplug area, which is
> always added and removed periodically, should be able to expose this problem.
> "
> My Answer: As you already know HugeTLB pages inside the hot remove section
> is safe.

It would be helpful if you could explain *why* that's safe, since those of us
coming at this cold have no idea whether this is the case.

> Let's talk your question "what about other HugeTLB areas whose
> vmemmap area shares page table entries with vmemmap entries for a section
> being hot removed ?", the question is not established. Why? The minimal
> granularity size of hotplug memory 128MB (on arm64, 4k base page), so any
> HugeTLB smaller than 128MB is within a section, then, there is no share
> (PTE) page tables between HugeTLB in this section and ones in other
> sections and a HugeTLB could not cross two sections.

Am I correct in assuming that in this case we never free the section?

> Any HugeTLB bigger than 128MB (e.g. 1GB) whose size is an integer multible of
> a section and vmemmap area is also an integer multiple of 2MB. At the time
> memory is removed, all huge pages either have been migrated away or
> dissolved. The vmemmap is stable. So there is no problem in this case as
> well.

Are you mention 2MB here because we PMD-map the vmemmap with 4K pages?

IIUC, so long as:

1) HugeTLBs are naturally aligned, power-of-two sizes
2) The HugeTLB size >= the section size
3) The HugeTLB size >= the vmemmap leaf mapping size

... then a HugeTLB will not share any leaf page table entries with *anything
else*, but will share intermediate entries.

Perhaps that's a clearer line of argument?

Regardless, this should be in the commit message.

> 2nd concern:
> "
> differently, not sure if ptdump would require any synchronization.
>
> Dumping an wrong value is probably okay but crashing because a page table
> entry is being freed after ptdump acquired the pointer is bad. On arm64,
> ptdump() is protected against hotremove via [get|put]_online_mems().
> "
> My Answer: The ptdump should be fine since vmemmap_remap_free() only exchanges
> PTEs or split the PMD entry (which means allocating a PTE page table). Both
> operations do not free any page tables, so ptdump cannot run into a UAF on
> any page tables. The wrost case is just dumping an wrong value.

This should be in the commit message.

Thanks,
Mark.

>
> [1] https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/b8cdc9c8-853c-8392-a2fa-4f1a8f02057a@arm.com/T/
>
> fs/Kconfig | 2 +-
> 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)
>
> diff --git a/fs/Kconfig b/fs/Kconfig
> index 7a2b11c0b803..04cfd5bf5ec9 100644
> --- a/fs/Kconfig
> +++ b/fs/Kconfig
> @@ -247,7 +247,7 @@ config HUGETLB_PAGE
>
> config HUGETLB_PAGE_FREE_VMEMMAP
> def_bool HUGETLB_PAGE
> - depends on X86_64
> + depends on X86_64 || ARM64
> depends on SPARSEMEM_VMEMMAP
>
> config HUGETLB_PAGE_FREE_VMEMMAP_DEFAULT_ON
> --
> 2.11.0