On Mon, Oct 20 2025, Pasha Tatashin wrote:
KHO memory preservation metadata is preserved in 512 byte chunks which requires their allocation from slab allocator. Slabs are not safe to be used with KHO because of kfence, and because partial slabs may lead leaks to the next kernel. Change the size to be PAGE_SIZE.
The kfence specifically may cause memory corruption, where it randomly provides slab objects that can be within the scratch area. The reason for that is that kfence allocates its objects prior to KHO scratch is marked as CMA region.
While this change could potentially increase metadata overhead on systems with sparsely preserved memory, this is being mitigated by ongoing work to reduce sparseness during preservation via 1G guest pages. Furthermore, this change aligns with future work on a stateless KHO, which will also use page-sized bitmaps for its radix tree metadata.
Signed-off-by: Pasha Tatashin pasha.tatashin@soleen.com
Reviewed-by: Pratyush Yadav pratyush@kernel.org
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