Race condition observed between page migration and page fault handling on arm64 machines

[David Hildenbrand]

On 01.08.24 15:43, Will Deacon wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 01, 2024 at 03:26:57PM +0200, David Hildenbrand wrote:
>> On 01.08.24 15:13, David Hildenbrand wrote:
>>>>>> To dampen the tradeoff, we could do this in shmem_fault() instead? But
>>>>>> then, this would mean that we do this in all
>>>>>>
>>>>>> kinds of vma->vm_ops->fault, only when we discover another reference
>>>>>> count race condition :) Doing this in do_fault()
>>>>>>
>>>>>> should solve this once and for all. In fact, do_pte_missing() may call
>>>>>> do_anonymous_page() or do_fault(), and I just
>>>>>>
>>>>>> noticed that the former already checks this using vmf_pte_changed().
>>>>>
>>>>> What I am still missing is why this is (a) arm64 only; and (b) if this
>>>>> is something we should really worry about. There are other reasons
>>>>> (e.g., speculative references) why migration could temporarily fail,
>>>>> does it happen that often that it is really something we have to worry
>>>>> about?
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> (a) See discussion at [1]; I guess it passes on x86, which is quite
>>>> strange since the race is clearly arch-independent.
>>>
>>> Yes, I think this is what we have to understand. Is the race simply less
>>> likely to trigger on x86?
>>>
>>> I would assume that it would trigger on any arch.
>>>
>>> I just ran it on a x86 VM with 2 NUMA nodes and it also seems to work here.
>>>
>>> Is this maybe related to deferred flushing? Such that the other CPU will
>>> by accident just observe the !pte_none a little less likely?
>>>
>>> But arm64 also usually defers flushes, right? At least unless
>>> ARM64_WORKAROUND_REPEAT_TLBI is around. With that we never do deferred
>>> flushes.
>>
>> Bingo!
>>
>> diff --git a/mm/rmap.c b/mm/rmap.c
>> index e51ed44f8b53..ce94b810586b 100644
>> --- a/mm/rmap.c
>> +++ b/mm/rmap.c
>> @@ -718,10 +718,7 @@ static void set_tlb_ubc_flush_pending(struct mm_struct
>> *mm, pte_t pteval,
>>    */
>>   static bool should_defer_flush(struct mm_struct *mm, enum ttu_flags flags)
>>   {
>> -       if (!(flags & TTU_BATCH_FLUSH))
>> -               return false;
>> -
>> -       return arch_tlbbatch_should_defer(mm);
>> +       return false;
>>   }
>>
>>
>> On x86:
>>
>> # ./migration
>> TAP version 13
>> 1..1
>> # Starting 1 tests from 1 test cases.
>> #  RUN           migration.shared_anon ...
>> Didn't migrate 1 pages
>> # migration.c:170:shared_anon:Expected migrate(ptr, self->n1, self->n2) (-2)
>> == 0 (0)
>> # shared_anon: Test terminated by assertion
>> #          FAIL  migration.shared_anon
>> not ok 1 migration.shared_anon
>>
>>
>> It fails all of the time!
> 
> Nice work! I suppose that makes sense as, with the eager TLB
> invalidation, the window between the other CPU faulting and the
> migration entry being written is fairly wide.
> 
> Not sure about a fix though :/ It feels a bit overkill to add a new
> invalid pte encoding just for this.

Something like that might make the test happy in most cases:

diff --git a/tools/testing/selftests/mm/migration.c b/tools/testing/selftests/mm/migration.c
index 6908569ef406..4c18bfc13b94 100644
--- a/tools/testing/selftests/mm/migration.c
+++ b/tools/testing/selftests/mm/migration.c
@@ -65,6 +65,7 @@ int migrate(uint64_t *ptr, int n1, int n2)
         int ret, tmp;
         int status = 0;
         struct timespec ts1, ts2;
+       int errors = 0;
  
         if (clock_gettime(CLOCK_MONOTONIC, &ts1))
                 return -1;
@@ -79,12 +80,17 @@ int migrate(uint64_t *ptr, int n1, int n2)
                 ret = move_pages(0, 1, (void **) &ptr, &n2, &status,
                                 MPOL_MF_MOVE_ALL);
                 if (ret) {
-                       if (ret > 0)
+                       if (ret > 0) {
+                               if (++errors < 100)
+                                       continue;
                                 printf("Didn't migrate %d pages\n", ret);
-                       else
+                       } else {
                                 perror("Couldn't migrate pages");
+                       }
                         return -2;
                 }
+               /* Progress! */
+               errors = 0;
  
                 tmp = n2;
                 n2 = n1;


[root at localhost mm]# ./migration
TAP version 13
1..1
# Starting 1 tests from 1 test cases.
#  RUN           migration.shared_anon ...
#            OK  migration.shared_anon
ok 1 migration.shared_anon
# PASSED: 1 / 1 tests passed.
# Totals: pass:1 fail:0 xfail:0 xpass:0 skip:0 error:0


-- 
Cheers,

David / dhildenb