Re: bug: move_pages(2) does not udpate "status" if no pages are moved

[John Hubbard <jhubbard@nvidia.com>]

On 12/4/19 12:04 PM, Yang Shi wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 4, 2019 at 11:21 AM John Hubbard <jhubbard@nvidia.com> wrote:
>>
>> On 12/4/19 11:01 AM, Felix Abecassis wrote:
>>> Hello all,
>>>
>>
>> Hi Felix,
>>
>> Thanks for writing up a very clear description of the problem.
>>
>>> On kernel 5.3, when using the move_pages syscall (wrapped by libnuma) and all
>>> pages happen to be on the right node already, this function returns 0 but the
>>> "status" array is not updated. This array potentially contains garbage values
>>> (e.g. from malloc(3)), and I don't see a way to detect this.
>>
>>
>> The way to detect this case would be to zero the array before calling move_pages().
>> Then, if move_pages() returns 0, and the array remains full of zeroes, you can
>> conclude that move_pages() "succeeded", and that there were no errors for any
>> of the pages. So the pages are where you requested them to end up.
> 
> I don't think we can just simply return all zeros here. It looks the
> status should contain error code or the target node id if the page is
> moved to that node successfully. So, if the page is already on the
> requested node, the status should contain the current node id, but the
> current node maybe not 0.
> 
> So, IMHO it sounds like a valid bug.
> 

Yes, you're right, a more precise reading of the man page does support that: 
if move_pages() returns 0, then the status array *must* contain valid node IDs. 
I see. (Felix also mentioned the same thing, in a side note.)

Looking some more at both the man page and Felix's report (and the kernel 
implementation), it seems like there are maybe two bugs here:

1) Not setting the status array in some cases, if some pages were not moved for
"non fatal" reasons, and

2) Returning success if no pages were moved. The "ERRORS" section of the man
page seems to require that ENOENT be returned in that case. Although, you could
perhaps argue that this statement is only unidirectional. In other words, maybe
ENOENT happens, but it doesn't *have* to happen, if all pages were already on the
target node.

ERRORS

ENOENT No pages were found that require moving.  All pages are either already 
       on the target node, not present, had an  invalid  address  or could not
       be moved because they were mapped by multiple processes.


thanks,
-- 
John Hubbard
NVIDIA