Re: [PATCH v3 07/13] mm, swap: hold a reference during scan and cleanup flag usage

Kairui Song
2025-01-13T05:34:56Z

On Sat, Jan 4, 2025 at 1:46 PM Baoquan He <bhe@redhat.com> wrote:
>
> On 12/31/24 at 01:46am, Kairui Song wrote:
> > From: Kairui Song <kasong@tencent.com>
> >
> > The flag SWP_SCANNING was used as an indicator of whether a device
> > is being scanned for allocation, and prevents swapoff. Combined with
> > SWP_WRITEOK, they work as a set of barriers for a clean swapoff:
> >
> > 1. Swapoff clears SWP_WRITEOK, allocation requests will see
> > ~SWP_WRITEOK and abort as it's serialized by si->lock.
> > 2. Swapoff unuses all allocated entries.
> > 3. Swapoff waits for SWP_SCANNING flag to be cleared, so ongoing
> > allocations will stop, preventing UAF.
> > 4. Now swapoff can free everything safely.
> >
> > This will make the allocation path have a hard dependency on
> > si->lock. Allocation always have to acquire si->lock first for
> > setting SWP_SCANNING and checking SWP_WRITEOK.
> >
> > This commit removes this flag, and just uses the existing per-CPU
> > refcount instead to prevent UAF in step 3, which serves well for
> > such usage without dependency on si->lock, and scales very well too.
> > Just hold a reference during the whole scan and allocation process.
> > Swapoff will kill and wait for the counter.
> >
> > And for preventing any allocation from happening after step 1 so the
> > unuse in step 2 can ensure all slots are free, swapoff will acquire
> > the ci->lock of each cluster one by one to ensure all allocations
> > see ~SWP_WRITEOK and abort.
>
> Changing to use si->users is great, while wondering why we need acquire =
> each ci->lock now. After setup 1, we have cleared SWP_WRITEOK, and take
> the si off swap_avail_heads list. No matter what, we just need wait for
> p->comm's completion and continue, why bothering to loop for the
> ci->lock acquiring?
>

Hi Baoquan,

Waiting for p->comm's completion must be done after unuse is called
(unuse will need to take the si->users refcound, so it can't be dead
yet), but unuse must be called after no one will allocate any new
entry. That is guaranteed by the loop ci->lock acquiring.