Commit 4e31635c authored Oct 02, 2010 by Hugh Dickins Committed by Linus Torvalds Oct 04, 2010

ksm: fix bad user data when swapping



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 <hughd@google.com>
Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com>
Cc: stable@kernel.org
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

parent 4829b906

mm/ksm.c

+4 −2

Original line number	Diff line number	Diff line
		@@ -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);
		@@ -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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