[PATCH 1/3] mm: Move arch_do_swap_page() call to before swap_free()

David Hildenbrand david at redhat.com
Fri May 19 02:21:35 PDT 2023


>> Sorry, I meant actual anonymous memory pages, not shmem. Like, anonymous
>> pages that are COW-shared due to fork() or KSM.
>>
>> How does MTE, in general, interact with that? Assume one process ends up
>> modifying the tags ... and the page is COW-shared with a different
>> process that should not observe these tag modifications.
> 
> Tag modifications cause write faults if the page is read-only, so for
> COW shared pages we would end up copying the page in the usual way,
> which on arm64 would copy the tags as well via the copy_highpage hook
> (see arch/arm64/mm/copypage.c).

Oh, that makes sense, thanks for pointing that out!

... and I can spot that KSM also checks the tag when de-duplicating: 
pages_identical() ends up calling memcmp_pages(), which knows how to 
deal with tags.

Interestingly, calc_checksum() does not seem to care about tags. But 
that simply implies that pages with the same content have same checksum, 
independent of the tag. And pages_identical() is the single source of truth.

-- 
Thanks,

David / dhildenb




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