Re: [PATCH v3] arm64: mm: Fix NOMAP page initialization

From: Hanjun Guo
Date: Wed Jan 04 2017 - 21:04:11 EST


On 2017/1/4 21:56, Ard Biesheuvel wrote:
On 16 December 2016 at 16:54, Robert Richter <rrichter@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On ThunderX systems with certain memory configurations we see the
following BUG_ON():

kernel BUG at mm/page_alloc.c:1848!

This happens for some configs with 64k page size enabled. The BUG_ON()
checks if start and end page of a memmap range belongs to the same
zone.

The BUG_ON() check fails if a memory zone contains NOMAP regions. In
this case the node information of those pages is not initialized. This
causes an inconsistency of the page links with wrong zone and node
information for that pages. NOMAP pages from node 1 still point to the
mem zone from node 0 and have the wrong nid assigned.

The reason for the mis-configuration is a change in pfn_valid() which
reports pages marked NOMAP as invalid:

68709f45385a arm64: only consider memblocks with NOMAP cleared for linear mapping

This causes pages marked as nomap being no longer reassigned to the
new zone in memmap_init_zone() by calling __init_single_pfn().

Fixing this by implementing an arm64 specific early_pfn_valid(). This
causes all pages of sections with memory including NOMAP ranges to be
initialized by __init_single_page() and ensures consistency of page
links to zone, node and section.


I like this solution a lot better than the first one, but I am still
somewhat uneasy about having the kernel reason about attributes of
pages it should not touch in the first place. But the fact that
early_pfn_valid() is only used a single time in the whole kernel does
give some confidence that we are not simply moving the problem
elsewhere.

Given that you are touching arch/arm/ as well as arch/arm64, could you
explain why only arm64 needs this treatment? Is it simply because we
don't have NUMA support there?

Considering that Hisilicon D05 suffered from the same issue, I would
like to get some coverage there as well. Hanjun, is this something you
can arrange? Thanks

Sure, we will test this patch with LTP MM stress test (which triggers
the bug on D05), and give the feedback.

Thanks
Hanjun