Re: [Xen-devel] Fwd: Re: struct page field arrangement

["Jan Beulich" <jbeulich@xxxxxxxxxx>]

>>> Keir Fraser <keir@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> 16.03.07 13:25 >>>
>On 16/3/07 12:11, "Keir Fraser" <keir@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>>> page_referenced_one() in mm/rmap.c). If this happens when
>>> xen_pgd_unpin() has already passed the respective pte page, but
>>> mm_walk() hasn't reached the page, yet, the update will fail (if done
>>> directly, ptwr will no pick this up, and if done through a hypercall, the
>>> call would fail, likely producing a BUG()).
>> 
>> What kind of stress test did you run? I was expecting that unpin would be
>> okay because we only call mm_unpin() from _arch_exit_mmap() if the mm_count
>> is 1 (which I believe means the mm is not active in any task).

newburn on machines with not too much (<= 2G) memory.

>And actually the pinning happens on activate_mm() in most cases, which I
>would expect to be 'early enough' since noone can run on the mm before that?
>
>If you've managed to provoke bugs then that's very interesting (and scary)!
>
>I suppose if I understand the rmap case correctly, we're still susceptible
>to the paging kernel thread trying to page things out at any time? Is that
>what you think you've been seeing go wrong?

Yes, somewhere in that area. From the data I have (page fault on the
page table write in ptep_clear_flush_young(), with the page table dump
showing the page to be writeable and present) I can only conclude that
the race is with the unpin path (otherwise I should see the page being
write protected), while the vm scan tries to recover memory at the same
time, and since this scan is scanning zones, not mm-s, the references to
the mm-s are being obtained from struct page -> vma -> mm (i.e. the
mm-s' use counts don't matter here).

Jan

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