There are a few subtle races, between change_protection_range (used by
mprotect and change_prot_numa) on one side, and NUMA page migration and
compaction on the other side.
The basic race is that there is a time window between when the PTE gets
made non-present (PROT_NONE or NUMA), and the TLB is flushed.
During that time, a CPU may continue writing to the page.
This is fine most of the time, however compaction or the NUMA migration
code may come in, and migrate the page away.
When that happens, the CPU may continue writing, through the cached
translation, to what is no longer the current memory location of the
process.
This only affects x86, which has a somewhat optimistic pte_accessible.
All other architectures appear to be safe, and will either always flush,
or flush whenever there is a valid mapping, even with no permissions
(SPARC).
The basic race looks like this:
CPU A CPU B CPU C
load TLB entry
make entry PTE/PMD_NUMA
fault on entry
read/write old page
start migrating page
change PTE/PMD to new page
read/write old page [*]
flush TLB
reload TLB from new entry
read/write new page
lose data
[*] the old page may belong to a new user at this point!
The obvious fix is to flush remote TLB entries, by making sure that
pte_accessible aware of the fact that PROT_NONE and PROT_NUMA memory may
still be accessible if there is a TLB flush pending for the mm.
This should fix both NUMA migration and compaction.
[mgorman@suse.de: fix build]
Signed-off-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Cc: Alex Thorlton <athorlton@sgi.com>
Cc: <stable@vger.kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Rik van Riel
2084140594