Re: [PATCH] x86/mm: drop 4MB restriction on minimal NUMA node size

From: David Hildenbrand
Date: Tue Oct 17 2023 - 03:29:15 EST


On 17.10.23 08:22, Mike Rapoport wrote:
From: "Mike Rapoport (IBM)" <rppt@xxxxxxxxxx>

Qi Zheng reports crashes in a production environment and provides a
simplified example as a reproducer:

For example, if we use qemu to start a two NUMA node kernel,
one of the nodes has 2M memory (less than NODE_MIN_SIZE),
and the other node has 2G, then we will encounter the
following panic:

[ 0.149844] BUG: kernel NULL pointer dereference, address: 0000000000000000
[ 0.150783] #PF: supervisor write access in kernel mode
[ 0.151488] #PF: error_code(0x0002) - not-present page
<...>
[ 0.156056] RIP: 0010:_raw_spin_lock_irqsave+0x22/0x40
<...>
[ 0.169781] Call Trace:
[ 0.170159] <TASK>
[ 0.170448] deactivate_slab+0x187/0x3c0
[ 0.171031] ? bootstrap+0x1b/0x10e
[ 0.171559] ? preempt_count_sub+0x9/0xa0
[ 0.172145] ? kmem_cache_alloc+0x12c/0x440
[ 0.172735] ? bootstrap+0x1b/0x10e
[ 0.173236] bootstrap+0x6b/0x10e
[ 0.173720] kmem_cache_init+0x10a/0x188
[ 0.174240] start_kernel+0x415/0x6ac
[ 0.174738] secondary_startup_64_no_verify+0xe0/0xeb
[ 0.175417] </TASK>
[ 0.175713] Modules linked in:
[ 0.176117] CR2: 0000000000000000

The crashes happen because of inconsistency between nodemask that has
nodes with less than 4MB as memoryless and the actual memory fed into
core mm.

The commit 9391a3f9c7f1 ("[PATCH] x86_64: Clear more state when ignoring
empty node in SRAT parsing") that introduced minimal size of a NUMA node
does not explain why a node size cannot be less than 4MB and what boot
failures this restriction might fix.

Since then a lot has changed and core mm won't confuse badly about small
node sizes.

Drop the limitation for the minimal node size.

Reported-by: Qi Zheng <zhengqi.arch@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Signed-off-by: Mike Rapoport (IBM) <rppt@xxxxxxxxxx>
Acked-by: David Hildenbrand <david@xxxxxxxxxx>
Acked-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@xxxxxxxx>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/all/20230212110305.93670-1-zhengqi.arch@xxxxxxxxxxxxx/

That's just a resend I assume? Or has anything changed?

--
Cheers,

David / dhildenb