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ksm: fix bad user data when swapping
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Building under memory pressure, with KSM on 2.6.36-rc5, collapsed with
an internal compiler error: typically indicating an error in swapping.

Perhaps there's a timing issue which makes it now more likely, perhaps
it's just a long time since I tried for so long: this bug goes back to
KSM swapping in 2.6.33.

Notice how reuse_swap_page() allows an exclusive page to be reused, but
only does SetPageDirty if it can delete it from swap cache right then -
if it's currently under Writeback, it has to be left in cache and we
don't SetPageDirty, but the page can be reused.  Fine, the dirty bit
will get set in the pte; but notice how zap_pte_range() does not bother
to transfer pte_dirty to page_dirty when unmapping a PageAnon.

If KSM chooses to share such a page, it will look like a clean copy of
swapcache, and not be written out to swap when its memory is needed;
then stale data read back from swap when it's needed again.

We could fix this in reuse_swap_page() (or even refuse to reuse a
page under writeback), but it's more honest to fix my oversight in
KSM's write_protect_page().  Several days of testing on three machines
confirms that this fixes the issue they showed.

Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <[email protected]>
Cc: Andrew Morton <[email protected]>
Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected]
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <[email protected]>
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Hugh Dickins authored and torvalds committed Oct 4, 2010
1 parent 4829b90 commit 4e31635
Showing 1 changed file with 4 additions and 2 deletions.
6 changes: 4 additions & 2 deletions mm/ksm.c
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -712,7 +712,7 @@ static int write_protect_page(struct vm_area_struct *vma, struct page *page,
if (!ptep)
goto out;

if (pte_write(*ptep)) {
if (pte_write(*ptep) || pte_dirty(*ptep)) {
pte_t entry;

swapped = PageSwapCache(page);
Expand All @@ -735,7 +735,9 @@ static int write_protect_page(struct vm_area_struct *vma, struct page *page,
set_pte_at(mm, addr, ptep, entry);
goto out_unlock;
}
entry = pte_wrprotect(entry);
if (pte_dirty(entry))
set_page_dirty(page);
entry = pte_mkclean(pte_wrprotect(entry));
set_pte_at_notify(mm, addr, ptep, entry);
}
*orig_pte = *ptep;
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