tree 1987a2c704cc97d8adf603054c9d89d18b9b30e0
parent a1e78772d72b2616ed20e54896e68e0e7044854e
author Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie> 1216873645 -0700
committer Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> 1216921636 -0700

hugetlb: guarantee that COW faults for a process that called mmap(MAP_PRIVATE) on hugetlbfs will succeed

After patch 2 in this series, a process that successfully calls mmap() for
a MAP_PRIVATE mapping will be guaranteed to successfully fault until a
process calls fork().  At that point, the next write fault from the parent
could fail due to COW if the child still has a reference.

We only reserve pages for the parent but a copy must be made to avoid
leaking data from the parent to the child after fork().  Reserves could be
taken for both parent and child at fork time to guarantee faults but if
the mapping is large it is highly likely we will not have sufficient pages
for the reservation, and it is common to fork only to exec() immediatly
after.  A failure here would be very undesirable.

Note that the current behaviour of mainline with MAP_PRIVATE pages is
pretty bad.  The following situation is allowed to occur today.

1. Process calls mmap(MAP_PRIVATE)
2. Process calls mlock() to fault all pages and makes sure it succeeds
3. Process forks()
4. Process writes to MAP_PRIVATE mapping while child still exists
5. If the COW fails at this point, the process gets SIGKILLed even though it
   had taken care to ensure the pages existed

This patch improves the situation by guaranteeing the reliability of the
process that successfully calls mmap().  When the parent performs COW, it
will try to satisfy the allocation without using reserves.  If that fails
the parent will steal the page leaving any children without a page.
Faults from the child after that point will result in failure.  If the
child COW happens first, an attempt will be made to allocate the page
without reserves and the child will get SIGKILLed on failure.

To summarise the new behaviour:

1. If the original mapper performs COW on a private mapping with multiple
   references, it will attempt to allocate a hugepage from the pool or
   the buddy allocator without using the existing reserves. On fail, VMAs
   mapping the same area are traversed and the page being COW'd is unmapped
   where found. It will then steal the original page as the last mapper in
   the normal way.

2. The VMAs the pages were unmapped from are flagged to note that pages
   with data no longer exist. Future no-page faults on those VMAs will
   terminate the process as otherwise it would appear that data was corrupted.
   A warning is printed to the console that this situation occured.

2. If the child performs COW first, it will attempt to satisfy the COW
   from the pool if there are enough pages or via the buddy allocator if
   overcommit is allowed and the buddy allocator can satisfy the request. If
   it fails, the child will be killed.

If the pool is large enough, existing applications will not notice that
the reserves were a factor.  Existing applications depending on the
no-reserves been set are unlikely to exist as for much of the history of
hugetlbfs, pages were prefaulted at mmap(), allocating the pages at that
point or failing the mmap().

[npiggin@suse.de: fix CONFIG_HUGETLB=n build]
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
Acked-by: Adam Litke <agl@us.ibm.com>
Cc: Andy Whitcroft <apw@shadowen.org>
Cc: William Lee Irwin III <wli@holomorphy.com>
Cc: Hugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com>
Cc: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>