Bad use of highmem with buffer_migrate_page?

[Marek Szyprowski]

Hello,

On Thursday, May 10, 2012 10:08 PM Laura Abbott wrote:

> I did a backport of the Contiguous Memory Allocator to a 3.0.8 tree. I
> wrote fairly simple test case that, in 1MB chunks, allocs up to 40MB
> from a reserved area, maps, writes, unmaps and then frees in an infinite
> loop. When running this with another program in parallel to put some
> stress on the filesystem, I hit data aborts in the filesystem/journal
> layer, although not always the same backtrace. As an example:
> 
> [<c02907a4>] (__ext4_check_dir_entry+0x20/0x184) from [<c029e1a8>]
> (add_dirent_to_buf+0x70/0x2ac)
> [<c029e1a8>] (add_dirent_to_buf+0x70/0x2ac) from [<c029f3f0>]
> (ext4_add_entry+0xd8/0x4bc)
> [<c029f3f0>] (ext4_add_entry+0xd8/0x4bc) from [<c029fe90>]
> (ext4_add_nondir+0x14/0x64)
> [<c029fe90>] (ext4_add_nondir+0x14/0x64) from [<c02a04c4>]
> (ext4_create+0xd8/0x120)
> [<c02a04c4>] (ext4_create+0xd8/0x120) from [<c022e134>]
> (vfs_create+0x74/0xa4)
> [<c022e134>] (vfs_create+0x74/0xa4) from [<c022ed3c>] (do_last+0x588/0x8d4)
> [<c022ed3c>] (do_last+0x588/0x8d4) from [<c022fe64>]
> (path_openat+0xc4/0x394)
> [<c022fe64>] (path_openat+0xc4/0x394) from [<c0230214>]
> (do_filp_open+0x30/0x7c)
> [<c0230214>] (do_filp_open+0x30/0x7c) from [<c0220cb4>]
> (do_sys_open+0xd8/0x174)
> [<c0220cb4>] (do_sys_open+0xd8/0x174) from [<c0105ea0>]
> (ret_fast_syscall+0x0/0x30)
> 
> Every panic had the same issue where a struct buffer_head [1] had a
> b_data that was unexpectedly NULL.
> 
> During the course of CMA, buffer_migrate_page could be called to migrate
> from a CMA page to a new page. buffer_migrate_page calls set_bh_page[2]
> to set the new page for the buffer_head. If the new page is a highmem
> page though, the bh->b_data ends up as NULL, which could produce the
> panics seen above.
> 
> This seems to indicate that highmem pages are not not appropriate for
> use as pages to migrate to. The following made the problem go away for me:
> 
> --- a/mm/page_alloc.c
> +++ b/mm/page_alloc.c
> @@ -5753,7 +5753,7 @@ static struct page *
>   __alloc_contig_migrate_alloc(struct page *page, unsigned long private,
>                               int **resultp)
>   {
> -       return alloc_page(GFP_HIGHUSER_MOVABLE);
> +       return alloc_page(GFP_USER | __GFP_MOVABLE);
>   }
> 
> 
> Does this seem like an actual issue or is this an artifact of my
> backport to 3.0? I'm not familiar enough with the filesystem layer to be
> able to tell where highmem can actually be used.

I will need to investigate this further as this issue doesn't appear on 
v3.3+ kernels, but I remember I saw something similar when I tried CMA 
backported to v3.0.

You have pointed to an important issue which we need to solve somehow. CMA
wasn't fully tested with high mem and it looks that there are some issues here
and there. Your patch will prevent using highmem for any migration triggered by
CMA. IMHO this is a bit limited, but right now I have no better idea. For a
quick backport it should be ok.
 
Best regards
-- 
Marek Szyprowski
Samsung Poland R&D Center