3.16.61-rc1 review patch. If anyone has any objections, please let me know.
------------------
From: Vlastimil Babka vbabka@suse.cz
commit 7810e6781e0fcbca78b91cf65053f895bf59e85f upstream.
In __alloc_pages_slowpath() we reset zonelist and preferred_zoneref for allocations that can ignore memory policies. The zonelist is obtained from current CPU's node. This is a problem for __GFP_THISNODE allocations that want to allocate on a different node, e.g. because the allocating thread has been migrated to a different CPU.
This has been observed to break SLAB in our 4.4-based kernel, because there it relies on __GFP_THISNODE working as intended. If a slab page is put on wrong node's list, then further list manipulations may corrupt the list because page_to_nid() is used to determine which node's list_lock should be locked and thus we may take a wrong lock and race.
Current SLAB implementation seems to be immune by luck thanks to commit 511e3a058812 ("mm/slab: make cache_grow() handle the page allocated on arbitrary node") but there may be others assuming that __GFP_THISNODE works as promised.
We can fix it by simply removing the zonelist reset completely. There is actually no reason to reset it, because memory policies and cpusets don't affect the zonelist choice in the first place. This was different when commit 183f6371aac2 ("mm: ignore mempolicies when using ALLOC_NO_WATERMARK") introduced the code, as mempolicies provided their own restricted zonelists.
We might consider this for 4.17 although I don't know if there's anything currently broken.
SLAB is currently not affected, but in kernels older than 4.7 that don't yet have 511e3a058812 ("mm/slab: make cache_grow() handle the page allocated on arbitrary node") it is. That's at least 4.4 LTS. Older ones I'll have to check.
So stable backports should be more important, but will have to be reviewed carefully, as the code went through many changes. BTW I think that also the ac->preferred_zoneref reset is currently useless if we don't also reset ac->nodemask from a mempolicy to NULL first (which we probably should for the OOM victims etc?), but I would leave that for a separate patch.
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20180525130853.13915-1-vbabka@suse.cz Signed-off-by: Vlastimil Babka vbabka@suse.cz Fixes: 183f6371aac2 ("mm: ignore mempolicies when using ALLOC_NO_WATERMARK") Acked-by: Mel Gorman mgorman@techsingularity.net Cc: Michal Hocko mhocko@kernel.org Cc: David Rientjes rientjes@google.com Cc: Joonsoo Kim iamjoonsoo.kim@lge.com Cc: Vlastimil Babka vbabka@suse.cz Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton akpm@linux-foundation.org Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds torvalds@linux-foundation.org [bwh: Backported to 3.16: Resetting the zonelist may still be useful here, so keep doing it if __GFP_THISNODE is not used.] Signed-off-by: Ben Hutchings ben@decadent.org.uk --- mm/page_alloc.c | 1 - 1 file changed, 1 deletion(-)
--- a/mm/page_alloc.c +++ b/mm/page_alloc.c @@ -2594,7 +2594,8 @@ rebalance: * the allocation is high priority and these type of * allocations are system rather than user orientated */ - zonelist = node_zonelist(numa_node_id(), gfp_mask); + if (!(gfp_mask & __GFP_THISNODE)) + zonelist = node_zonelist(numa_node_id(), gfp_mask);
page = __alloc_pages_high_priority(gfp_mask, order, zonelist, high_zoneidx, nodemask,