Re: [PATCH v6] mm: retry page faults once under the per-VMA lock

["Lorenzo Stoakes (ARM)" <ljs@kernel.org>]

On Tue, Oct 27, 2026 at 04:26:39PM +0000, Lorenzo Stoakes (ARM) wrote:
>
> Thread A (Parent)          | Thread B (Parent)       | Thread C (Parent)
> ---------------------------|-------------------------|----------------------
> < Fork >                   |                         | < has TLB entry >
> copy_present_ptes()        | < no TLB entry >        |
>   wrprotect parent page X  |                         |
>   -> 2 mappings, refs      | *ptr = x                |
>                            | < Page fault >          |
>                            | do_wp_page()            |
>                            |   < shared, so CoW >    |
>                            |   wp_page_copy()        |
>                            |     copy X -> new pg N  |
>                            |                         | *ptr = x;
>                            |                         | [ OOPS! stale TLB,
>                            |                         |   lands in X not N ]
>                            |     ptep_clear_flush()  |
>                            |       < TLB flush >     |
>                            |     parent PTE -> N     |
>                            |     [ X now child-only ]|
>                            |                         | ASSERT(*ptr == x);
> flush_tlb_mm(oldmm)        |                         | // fails! N lacks x
>   < far too late >         |                         |
>

Sigh, I drew this entirely manually, then had the LLM overlords 'correct' it,
but it also made it less clear :).

Thread C ends up writing to what-becomes-the-child-page X, whereas the parent
ends up with page N after CoW.

So a thread in the parent writes to a page of ordinary memory and then it
disappears under them, and the child ends up with corruption in their page.

--
Cheers, Lorenzo