Commits
Mel Gorman committed 69d763fc6d3
mm: pin address_space before dereferencing it while isolating an LRU page Minchan Kim asked the following question -- what locks protects address_space destroying when race happens between inode trauncation and __isolate_lru_page? Jan Kara clarified by describing the race as follows CPU1 CPU2 truncate(inode) __isolate_lru_page() ... truncate_inode_page(mapping, page); delete_from_page_cache(page) spin_lock_irqsave(&mapping->tree_lock, flags); __delete_from_page_cache(page, NULL) page_cache_tree_delete(..) ... mapping = page_mapping(page); page->mapping = NULL; ... spin_unlock_irqrestore(&mapping->tree_lock, flags); page_cache_free_page(mapping, page) put_page(page) if (put_page_testzero(page)) -> false - inode now has no pages and can be freed including embedded address_space if (mapping && !mapping->a_ops->migratepage) - we've dereferenced mapping which is potentially already free. The race is theoretically possible but unlikely. Before the delete_from_page_cache, truncate_cleanup_page is called so the page is likely to be !PageDirty or PageWriteback which gets skipped by the only caller that checks the mappping in __isolate_lru_page. Even if the race occurs, a substantial amount of work has to happen during a tiny window with no preemption but it could potentially be done using a virtual machine to artifically slow one CPU or halt it during the critical window. This patch should eliminate the race with truncation by try-locking the page before derefencing mapping and aborting if the lock was not acquired. There was a suggestion from Huang Ying to use RCU as a side-effect to prevent mapping being freed. However, I do not like the solution as it's an unconventional means of preserving a mapping and it's not a context where rcu_read_lock is obviously protecting rcu data. Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20180104102512.2qos3h5vqzeisrek@techsingularity.net Fixes: c82449352854 ("mm: compaction: make isolate_lru_page() filter-aware again") Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net> Acked-by: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org> Cc: "Huang, Ying" <ying.huang@intel.com> Cc: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>