Re: [PATCH v5 1/1] mm: refactor initialization of struct page for holes in memory layout

From: Mike Rapoport <rppt@kernel.org>
To: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: "Andrea Arcangeli" <aarcange@redhat.com>,
	"Baoquan He" <bhe@redhat.com>, "Borislav Petkov" <bp@alien8.de>,
	"Chris Wilson" <chris@chris-wilson.co.uk>,
	"David Hildenbrand" <david@redhat.com>,
	"H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com>,
	"Ingo Molnar" <mingo@redhat.com>,
	"Linus Torvalds" <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>,
	"Łukasz Majczak" <lma@semihalf.com>,
	"Mel Gorman" <mgorman@suse.de>,
	"Michal Hocko" <mhocko@kernel.org>,
	"Mike Rapoport" <rppt@linux.ibm.com>, "Qian Cai" <cai@lca.pw>,
	"Sarvela, Tomi P" <tomi.p.sarvela@intel.com>,
	"Thomas Gleixner" <tglx@linutronix.de>,
	"Vlastimil Babka" <vbabka@suse.cz>,
	linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux-mm@kvack.org,
	stable@vger.kernel.org, x86@kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH v5 1/1] mm: refactor initialization of struct page for holes in memory layout
Date: Mon, 8 Feb 2021 23:25:26 +0200	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20210208212526.GW242749@kernel.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20210208131100.7273d249a5d00cac0d247fcf@linux-foundation.org>

On Mon, Feb 08, 2021 at 01:11:00PM -0800, Andrew Morton wrote:
> On Mon,  8 Feb 2021 13:08:20 +0200 Mike Rapoport <rppt@kernel.org> wrote:
> 
> > There could be struct pages that are not backed by actual physical memory.
> > This can happen when the actual memory bank is not a multiple of
> > SECTION_SIZE or when an architecture does not register memory holes
> > reserved by the firmware as memblock.memory.
> > 
> > Such pages are currently initialized using init_unavailable_mem() function
> > that iterates through PFNs in holes in memblock.memory and if there is a
> > struct page corresponding to a PFN, the fields of this page are set to
> > default values and it is marked as Reserved.
> > 
> > init_unavailable_mem() does not take into account zone and node the page
> > belongs to and sets both zone and node links in struct page to zero.
> > 
> > On a system that has firmware reserved holes in a zone above ZONE_DMA, for
> > instance in a configuration below:
> > 
> > 	# grep -A1 E820 /proc/iomem
> > 	7a17b000-7a216fff : Unknown E820 type
> > 	7a217000-7bffffff : System RAM
> > 
> > unset zone link in struct page will trigger
> > 
> > 	VM_BUG_ON_PAGE(!zone_spans_pfn(page_zone(page), pfn), page);
> > 
> > because there are pages in both ZONE_DMA32 and ZONE_DMA (unset zone link
> > in struct page) in the same pageblock.
> > 
> > ...
> >
> > 
> > Fixes: 73a6e474cb37 ("mm: memmap_init: iterate over memblock regions rather
> > that check each PFN")
> 
> What are your thoughts on the priority of this (rather large!) fix? 
> Are such systems sufficiently common to warrant a 5.11 merge?  -stable?

I don't know how common are such systems, but the bug is exposed only for
builds with DEBUG_VM=y, so after problems with previous versions discovered
by various CI systems I'd say to hold it off till 5.11 is out.

If this time the fix works it'll make it to -stable anyway :)

-- 
Sincerely yours,
Mike.