Re: [PATCH] mm: migration :shared anonymous migration test is failing

David Hildenbrand
2024-12-19T12:55:18Z

On 19.12.24 13:47, Donet Tom wrote:
> The migration selftest is currently failing for shared anonymous
> mappings due to a race condition.
>
> During migration, the source folio's PTE is unmapped by nuking the
> PTE, flushing the TLB,and then marking the page for migration
> (by creating the swap entries). The issue arises when, immediately
> after the PTE is nuked and the TLB is flushed, but before the page
> is marked for migration, another thread accesses the page. This
> triggers a page fault, and the page fault handler invokes
> do_pte_missing() instead of do_swap_page(), as the page is not yet
> marked for migration.
>
> In the fault handling path, do_pte_missing() calls __do_fault()
> ->shmem_fault() -> shmem_get_folio_gfp() -> filemap_get_entry().
> This eventually calls folio_try_get(), incrementing the reference
> count of the folio undergoing migration. The thread then blocks
> on folio_lock(), as the migration path holds the lock. This
> results in the migration failing in __migrate_folio(), which expects
> the folio's reference count to be 2. However, the reference count is
> incremented by the fault handler, leading to the failure.
>
> The issue arises because, after nuking the PTE and before marking the
> page for migration, the page is accessed. To address this, we have
> updated the logic to first nuke the PTE, then mark the page for
> migration, and only then flush the TLB. With this patch, If the page is
> accessed immediately after nuking the PTE, the TLB entry is still
> valid, so no fault occurs. After marking the page for migration,
> flushing the TLB ensures that the next page fault correctly triggers
> do_swap_page() and waits for the migration to complete.
>

Does this reproduce with

commit 536ab838a5b37b6ae3f8d53552560b7c51daeb41
Author: Dev Jain <dev.jain@arm.com>
Date: Fri Aug 30 10:46:09 2024 +0530

selftests/mm: relax test to fail after 100 migration failures

It was recently observed at [1] that during the folio unmapping stage of
migration, when the PTEs are cleared, a racing thread faulting on that
folio may increase the refcount of the folio, sleep on the folio lock (the
migration path has the lock), and migration ultimately fails when
asserting the actual refcount against the expected. Thereby, the
migration selftest fails on shared-anon mappings. The above enforces the
fact that migration is a best-effort service, therefore, it is wrong to
fail the test for just a single failure; hence, fail the test after 100
consecutive failures (where 100 is still a subjective choice). Note that,
this has no effect on the execution time of the test since that is
controlled by a timeout.

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/all/20240801081657.1386743-1-dev.jain@arm.com/

part of 6.12?

As part of that discussion, we discussed alternatives, such as
retrying migration more often internally.

--
Cheers,

David / dhildenb