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From: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
To: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com>
Cc: "\\\"Kirill A. Shutemov\\\"" <kirill@shutemov.name>,
	linux-mm@kvack.org, stable@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH 1/1] mm: thp: fix SMP race condition between THP page fault and MADV_DONTNEED
Date: Tue, 23 Feb 2016 13:18:44 -0800	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20160223131844.d5d2767a0cc44bd8cbb78221@linux-foundation.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <1456253350-3959-2-git-send-email-aarcange@redhat.com>

On Tue, 23 Feb 2016 19:49:10 +0100 Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com> wrote:

> pmd_trans_unstable()/pmd_none_or_trans_huge_or_clear_bad() were
> introduced to locklessy (but atomically) detect when a pmd is a
> regular (stable) pmd or when the pmd is unstable and can infinitely
> transition from pmd_none() and pmd_trans_huge() from under us, while
> only holding the mmap_sem for reading (for writing not).
> 
> While holding the mmap_sem only for reading, MADV_DONTNEED can run
> from under us and so before we can assume the pmd to be a regular
> stable pmd we need to compare it against pmd_none() and
> pmd_trans_huge() in an atomic way, with pmd_trans_unstable(). The old
> pmd_trans_huge() left a tiny window for a race.
> 
> Useful applications are unlikely to notice the difference as doing
> MADV_DONTNEED concurrently with a page fault would lead to undefined
> behavior.

Thanks.

I put a cc:stable on this as it appears to be applicable to 4.4 and
perhaps earlier.

It generates a reject against 4.4 because of the recently-added
pmd_devmap() test.  It's easily fixed but I don't have a process to
handle -stable rejects.  This means that when Greg hits the reject
he'll ask us for a fixed up version.

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      reply	other threads:[~2016-02-23 21:18 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 13+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2016-02-23 15:49 THP race? Kirill A. Shutemov
2016-02-23 18:06 ` Andrea Arcangeli
2016-02-23 18:18   ` [PATCH 1/1] mm: thp: fix SMP race condition between THP page fault kbuild test robot
2016-02-23 18:21   ` kbuild test robot
2016-02-23 18:27   ` kbuild test robot
2016-02-23 18:38   ` THP race? Kirill A. Shutemov
2016-02-23 19:28     ` Andrea Arcangeli
2016-02-25 18:45       ` Dan Williams
2016-02-26 10:37         ` Kirill A. Shutemov
2016-02-26 14:46           ` Dan Williams
2016-02-23 18:49 ` [PATCH 0/1] " Andrea Arcangeli
2016-02-23 18:49   ` [PATCH 1/1] mm: thp: fix SMP race condition between THP page fault and MADV_DONTNEED Andrea Arcangeli
2016-02-23 21:18     ` Andrew Morton [this message]

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