be068f2903
Commit 09854ba94c6a ("mm: do_wp_page() simplification") reorganized all
the code around the page re-use vs copy, but in the process also moved
the final unlock_page() around to after the wp_page_reuse() call.
That normally doesn't matter - but it means that the unlock_page() is
now done after releasing the page table lock. Again, not a big deal,
you'd think.
But it turns out that it's very wrong indeed, because once we've
released the page table lock, we've basically lost our only reference to
the page - the page tables - and it could now be free'd at any time. We
do hold the mmap_sem, so no actual unmap() can happen, but madvise can
come in and a MADV_DONTNEED will zap the page range - and free the page.
So now the page may be free'd just as we're unlocking it, which in turn
will usually trigger a "Bad page state" error in the freeing path. To
make matters more confusing, by the time the debug code prints out the
page state, the unlock has typically completed and everything looks fine
again.
This all doesn't happen in any normal situations, but it does trigger
with the dirtyc0w_child LTP test. And it seems to trigger much more
easily (but not expclusively) on s390 than elsewhere, probably because
s390 doesn't do the "batch pages up for freeing after the TLB flush"
that gives the unlock_page() more time to complete and makes the race
harder to hit.
Fixes: 09854ba94c6a ("mm: do_wp_page() simplification")
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/a46e9bbef2ed4e17778f5615e818526ef848d791.camel@redhat.com/
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/c41149a8-211e-390b-af1d-d5eee690fecb@linux.alibaba.com/
Reported-by: Qian Cai <cai@redhat.com>
Reported-by: Alex Shi <alex.shi@linux.alibaba.com>
Bisected-and-analyzed-by: Gerald Schaefer <gerald.schaefer@linux.ibm.com>
Tested-by: Gerald Schaefer <gerald.schaefer@linux.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Linux kernel
============
There are several guides for kernel developers and users. These guides can
be rendered in a number of formats, like HTML and PDF. Please read
Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst first.
In order to build the documentation, use ``make htmldocs`` or
``make pdfdocs``. The formatted documentation can also be read online at:
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/
There are various text files in the Documentation/ subdirectory,
several of them using the Restructured Text markup notation.
Please read the Documentation/process/changes.rst file, as it contains the
requirements for building and running the kernel, and information about
the problems which may result by upgrading your kernel.