On 3/27/23 19:14, Alistair Popple wrote:
Device exclusive page table entries are used to prevent CPU access to a page whilst it is being accessed from a device. Typically this is used to implement atomic operations when the underlying bus does not support atomic access. When a CPU thread encounters a device exclusive entry it locks the page and restores the original entry after calling mmu notifiers to signal drivers that exclusive access is no longer available.
The device exclusive entry holds a reference to the page making it safe to access the struct page whilst the entry is present. However the fault handling code does not hold the PTL when taking the page lock. This means if there are multiple threads faulting concurrently on the device exclusive entry one will remove the entry whilst others will wait on the page lock without holding a reference.
This can lead to threads locking or waiting on a page with a zero refcount. Whilst mmap_lock prevents the pages getting freed via munmap() they may still be freed by a migration. This leads to warnings such as PAGE_FLAGS_CHECK_AT_FREE due to the page being locked when the refcount drops to zero. Note that during removal of the device exclusive entry the PTE is currently re-checked under the PTL so no futher bad page accesses occur once it is locked.
Signed-off-by: Alistair Popple apopple@nvidia.com Fixes: b756a3b5e7ea ("mm: device exclusive memory access") Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org
Thanks for finding this. You can add: Reviewed-by: Ralph Campbell rcampbell@nvidia.com