Re: [PATCH v5 0/12] mm: fix allocator races with memory hotplug

["Vlastimil Babka (SUSE)" <vbabka@kernel.org>]

On 11/1/26 03:13, Gregory Price (Meta) wrote:
> Memory hotplug rebuilds zonelists in place while allocations walk them,
> and offlining an emptied zone frees pagesets the vmstat worker can still
> hold.
> 
> These eleven fixes cover the walkers that crash, fail, or pick the wrong
> zone or node as a result, and a twelfth patch removes a helper that
> invites the same bug.
> 
>    1. a restarted slowpath loses its retry with reserves
>    2. offlining an emptied zone frees pagesets still in use
>    3. the reclaim_retry_zone tracepoint rereads a zoneref slot
>    4. the zonelist retry is compiled out without MEMORY_HOTREMOVE
>    5. zonelist_zone() may load its slot more than once
>    6. NULL preferred zone after a shrink rebuild
>    7. __next_zones_zonelist() rereads a slot
>    8. allocations land outside their zone or nodemask
>    9. the hugetlb pool walk takes another node's page
>   10. alloc_contig_pages() takes a range outside its filters
>   11. mempolicy_slab_node() rereads a slot
>   12. zonelist_node_idx() invites the same double read
> 
> Patches 1-11 are for stable.  Patch 12 is a cleanup and is not.
> 
> Patches 8-10 need patch 4, without which their retry is compiled
> out on HOTREMOVE=n kernels.
> 
> Patch 8 needs patch 1.
> 
> Patches 6, 7 and 11 need patch 5, which makes zonelist_zone() read
> the slot once.  Patch 12 needs patches 7 and 11, which remove the
> other callers of zonelist_node_idx().
> 
> Patches 2 and 3 are patches from anthropic, pulled in from Vlastimil's
> series to keep the backport issues self-contained on the series.
> 
> Testing
> =======
> 
> Each race was reproduced on unmodified source in a QEMU guest with three
> NUMA nodes and a 512M pc-dimm on node 1, left offline at boot.
> 
> A test module widens each window with a kprobe that stalls one CPU inside
> it, as an interrupt or a vCPU preemption would.
> 
>        base                            this series
> patch  outcome                  runs   outcome                  runs
> =====  =======================  =====  =======================  =====
>  1     NULL returned            3/3    page from reserves       3/3
>  2     UAF                      6/6    no UAF                   3/3
>  3     NULL dereference         3/3    allocation succeeds      3/3
>  4     allocation fails         3/3    waits for the rebuild    3/3
>  6     NULL dereference         3/3    ZONE_NORMAL page         3/3
>  7     NULL dereference         3/3    ZONE_NORMAL page         3/3
>  8     wrong zone or node       18/18  right zone and node      18/18
>  9     page from node 1         3/3    page from node 2         3/3
> 10     1G page in ZONE_MOVABLE  3/3    1G page in ZONE_NORMAL   3/3
> 11     NULL dereference         4/4    keeps allocating         3/3
> 
> 
> Cost (these tests were run on v4, v5 hasn't substantially changed)
> ====
> Kernel instructions per order-0 allocation and free in the QEMU guest,
> counted with a task-bound hardware instruction counter around 1M
> iterations on a pinned kthread, non-debug kernel, mean of 15 rounds.
> 
>                            instructions per alloc+free
>                              base   this series
>   alloc_pages()             890.5         900.5
>   bulk, nr=1, nodemask      865.5         875.5
>   bulk, nr=16, per page     477.2         478.1
> 
> 
> Bare metal, two-socket Xeon Gold 6138 (Skylake-SP, 80 CPUs).
> 
> will-it-scale page_fault1-3: each iteration touches one page, so
> the unit is millions of faults per second, summed over all tasks.
> 
> Base, millions of faults per second:
> 
>   tasks                         1     10     40     80
>   page_fault1, processes     0.46   4.16  10.51   9.23
>   page_fault1, threads       0.46   3.51   4.35   4.19
>   page_fault2, processes     0.43   3.66   9.02   8.33
>   page_fault2, threads       0.43   3.48   4.37   4.19
>   page_fault3, processes     3.89  14.78   8.10   8.00
>   page_fault3, threads       3.87  14.29   6.88   7.96
> 
> Change in faults per second with this series, + is faster:
> 
>   tasks                         1     10     40     80
>   page_fault1, processes    -0.3%  +0.1%  -3.0%  -1.7%
>   page_fault1, threads      -0.5%  -1.6%  -0.9%  -0.9%
>   page_fault2, processes    +0.0%  +0.9%  -1.4%  -0.5%
>   page_fault2, threads      +0.3%  +1.5%  -1.4%  -1.0%
>   page_fault3, processes    -1.0%  -3.8%  -0.7%  +1.2%
>   page_fault3, threads      -0.9%  -0.7%  +0.8%  -0.2%
> 
> The boot-to-boot stddev is 1.0-1.8% at 1 task and up to
> 15% in 10-80 tasks, so basically this is all within noise.
> 
> Changes in v5
> =============
> - Pulled in patches from Vlastimil's series (patches 2 and 3 here)
> - inline functions (Vlastimil)
> - Added patch 5: zonelist_zone() reads the slot with READ_ONCE(), as
>   recommended by sashiko on v4's mempolicy patch.
>   Patches 6, 7 and 11 call it instead of open-coding the load.
> - Added patch 12, removing zonelist_node_idx().  Not for stable.
> - Patch 1: reworded the changelog (Vlastimil).
> - Collected Reviewed-by tags.
> 
> Link: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/20261028211930.3504634-1-gourry@gourry.net/
> Link: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/20261027-pgalloc-ai-hotfixes-v1-0-9c7d1aca801e@kernel.org/
> Link: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/20261014222456.2318284-1-gourry@gourry.net/
> Link: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/20261015210539.3243563-1-gourry@gourry.net/
> Link: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/20261019172346.3344005-1-gourry@gourry.net/
> 
> Gregory Price (Meta) (10):
>   mm/page_alloc: reset can_retry_reserves when the slowpath restarts
>   mm/page_alloc: detect zonelist rebuilds from memory hot-add
>   mm/mmzone: read the zoneref slot once in zonelist_zone()
>   mm/page_alloc: snapshot the preferred zone against shrink rebuilds
>   mm/mmzone: read each zoneref slot once when filtering by nodemask
>   mm/page_alloc: retry allocations that raced with a zonelist rebuild
>   mm/hugetlb: retry the pool walk when the zonelist is rebuilt
>   mm/page_alloc: retry alloc_contig_pages() when the zonelist is rebuilt
>   mm/mempolicy: read the zoneref slot once in mempolicy_slab_node()
>   mm/mmzone: remove zonelist_node_idx()
> 
> Josef Bacik (2):
>   mm/page_alloc: keep the pagesets of an empty zone
>   mm, page_alloc: pass zone pointer to trace_reclaim_retry_zone

Thanks, applied to mm/page_alloc [1] page_alloc/for-next-fixes

It should result in no conflicts with other trees AFAICS.

Following David's MAINTAINERS updates [2] and mm-next call discussions,
we'll move ahead with the page_alloc.git tree (integrated to mm-next) now to
spread the handling of the endless fixes stream. I'll send the MAINTAINERS
update soon.

[1] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/mm/page_alloc.git
[2]
https://lore.kernel.org/all/20261030-maintainers-v1-0-97278f8a5f54@kernel.org/