Re: kernel 3.0: BUG: soft lockup: find_get_pages+0x51/0x110

[Nai Xia <nai.xia@gmail.com>]

On Saturday 22 October 2011 06:50:08 Andrea Arcangeli wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 21, 2011 at 07:41:20PM +0200, Andrea Arcangeli wrote:
> > We have two options:
> > 
> > 1) we remove the vma_merge call from copy_vma and we do the vma_merge
> > manually after mremap succeed (so then we're as safe as fork is and we
> > relay on the ordering). No locks but we'll just do 1 more allocation
> > for one addition temporary vma that will be removed after mremap
> > completed.
> > 
> > 2) Hugh's original fix.
> 
> 3) put the src vma at the tail if vma_merge succeeds and the src vma
> and dst vma aren't the same
> 
> I tried to implement this but I'm still wondering about the safety of
> this with concurrent processes all calling mremap at the same time on
> the same anon_vma same_anon_vma list, the reasoning I think it may be
> safe is in the comment. I run a few mremap with my benchmark where the
> THP aware mremap in -mm gets a x10 boost and moves 5G and it didn't

BTW, I am curious about what benchmark did you run and " x10 boost"
meaning compared to Hugh's anon_vma_locking fix?

> crash but that's about it and not conclusive, if you review please
> comment...

My comment is at the bottom of this post.

> 
> I've to pack luggage and prepare to fly to KS tomorrow so I may not be
> responsive in the next few days.
> 
> ===
> From f2898ff06b5a9a14b9d957c7696137f42a2438e9 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
> From: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com>
> Date: Sat, 22 Oct 2011 00:11:49 +0200
> Subject: [PATCH] mremap: enforce rmap src/dst vma ordering in case of
>  vma_merge succeeding in copy_vma
> 
> migrate was doing a rmap_walk with speculative lock-less access on
> pagetables. That could lead it to not serialize properly against
> mremap PT locks. But a second problem remains in the order of vmas in
> the same_anon_vma list used by the rmap_walk.
> 
> If vma_merge would succeed in copy_vma, the src vma could be placed
> after the dst vma in the same_anon_vma list. That could still lead
> migrate to miss some pte.
> 
> This patch adds a anon_vma_order_tail() function to force the dst vma
> at the end of the list before mremap starts to solve the problem.
> 
> If the mremap is very large and there are a lots of parents or childs
> sharing the anon_vma root lock, this should still scale better than
> taking the anon_vma root lock around every pte copy practically for
> the whole duration of mremap.
> ---
>  include/linux/rmap.h |    1 +
>  mm/mmap.c            |    8 ++++++++
>  mm/rmap.c            |   43 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>  3 files changed, 52 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
> 
> diff --git a/include/linux/rmap.h b/include/linux/rmap.h
> index 2148b12..45eb098 100644
> --- a/include/linux/rmap.h
> +++ b/include/linux/rmap.h
> @@ -120,6 +120,7 @@ void anon_vma_init(void);	/* create anon_vma_cachep */
>  int  anon_vma_prepare(struct vm_area_struct *);
>  void unlink_anon_vmas(struct vm_area_struct *);
>  int anon_vma_clone(struct vm_area_struct *, struct vm_area_struct *);
> +void anon_vma_order_tail(struct vm_area_struct *);
>  int anon_vma_fork(struct vm_area_struct *, struct vm_area_struct *);
>  void __anon_vma_link(struct vm_area_struct *);
>  
> diff --git a/mm/mmap.c b/mm/mmap.c
> index a65efd4..a5858dc 100644
> --- a/mm/mmap.c
> +++ b/mm/mmap.c
> @@ -2339,7 +2339,15 @@ struct vm_area_struct *copy_vma(struct vm_area_struct **vmap,
>  		 */
>  		if (vma_start >= new_vma->vm_start &&
>  		    vma_start < new_vma->vm_end)
> +			/*
> +			 * No need to call anon_vma_order_tail() in
> +			 * this case because the same PT lock will
> +			 * serialize the rmap_walk against both src
> +			 * and dst vmas.
> +			 */
>  			*vmap = new_vma;
> +		else
> +			anon_vma_order_tail(new_vma);
>  	} else {
>  		new_vma = kmem_cache_alloc(vm_area_cachep, GFP_KERNEL);
>  		if (new_vma) {
> diff --git a/mm/rmap.c b/mm/rmap.c
> index 8005080..170cece 100644
> --- a/mm/rmap.c
> +++ b/mm/rmap.c
> @@ -272,6 +272,49 @@ int anon_vma_clone(struct vm_area_struct *dst, struct vm_area_struct *src)
>  }
>  
>  /*
> + * Some rmap walk that needs to find all ptes/hugepmds without false
> + * negatives (like migrate and split_huge_page) running concurrent
> + * with operations that copy or move pagetables (like mremap() and
> + * fork()) to be safe depends the anon_vma "same_anon_vma" list to be
> + * in a certain order: the dst_vma must be placed after the src_vma in
> + * the list. This is always guaranteed by fork() but mremap() needs to
> + * call this function to enforce it in case the dst_vma isn't newly
> + * allocated and chained with the anon_vma_clone() function but just
> + * an extension of a pre-existing vma through vma_merge.
> + *
> + * NOTE: the same_anon_vma list can still changed by other processes
> + * while mremap runs because mremap doesn't hold the anon_vma mutex to
> + * prevent modifications to the list while it runs. All we need to
> + * enforce is that the relative order of this process vmas isn't
> + * changing (we don't care about other vmas order). Each vma
> + * corresponds to an anon_vma_chain structure so there's no risk that
> + * other processes calling anon_vma_order_tail() and changing the
> + * same_anon_vma list under mremap() will screw with the relative
> + * order of this process vmas in the list, because we won't alter the
> + * order of any vma that isn't belonging to this process. And there
> + * can't be another anon_vma_order_tail running concurrently with
> + * mremap() coming from this process because we hold the mmap_sem for
> + * the whole mremap(). fork() ordering dependency also shouldn't be
> + * affected because we only care that the parent vmas are placed in
> + * the list before the child vmas and anon_vma_order_tail won't reorder
> + * vmas from either the fork parent or child.
> + */
> +void anon_vma_order_tail(struct vm_area_struct *dst)
> +{
> +	struct anon_vma_chain *pavc;
> +	struct anon_vma *root = NULL;
> +
> +	list_for_each_entry_reverse(pavc, &dst->anon_vma_chain, same_vma) {
> +		struct anon_vma *anon_vma = pavc->anon_vma;
> +		VM_BUG_ON(pavc->vma != dst);
> +		root = lock_anon_vma_root(root, anon_vma);
> +		list_del(&pavc->same_anon_vma);
> +		list_add_tail(&pavc->same_anon_vma, &anon_vma->head);
> +	}
> +	unlock_anon_vma_root(root);
> +}

This patch and together with the reasoning looks good to me. 
But I wondering this patch can make the anon_vma chain ordering game more 
complex and harder to play in the future.
However, if it does bring much perfomance benefit, I vote for this patch 
because it balances all three requirements here: bug free, performance &
no two VMAs stay not merged for no good reason.

Our situation again makes me have the strong feeling that we are really
in bad need of a computer aided way to travel all possible state space.
There are some guys around me who do automatic software testing research.
But I am afraid our problem is too much "real world" for them... sigh...  



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