mm/ksm: fix interaction with THP

This patch fixes a corner case for KSM.  When two pages belong or belonged
to the same transparent hugepage, and they should be merged, KSM fails to
split the page, and therefore no merging happens.

This bug can be reproduced by:
* making sure ksm is running (in case disabling ksmtuned)
* enabling transparent hugepages
* allocating a THP-aligned 1-THP-sized buffer
  e.g. on amd64: posix_memalign(&p, 1<<21, 1<<21)
* filling it with the same values
  e.g. memset(p, 42, 1<<21)
* performing madvise to make it mergeable
  e.g. madvise(p, 1<<21, MADV_MERGEABLE)
* waiting for KSM to perform a few scans

The expected outcome is that the all the pages get merged (1 shared and
the rest sharing); the actual outcome is that no pages get merged (1
unshared and the rest volatile)

The reason of this behaviour is that we increase the reference count once
for both pages we want to merge, but if they belong to the same hugepage
(or compound page), the reference counter used in both cases is the one of
the head of the compound page.  This means that split_huge_page will find
a value of the reference counter too high and will fail.

This patch solves this problem by testing if the two pages to merge belong
to the same hugepage when attempting to merge them.  If so, the hugepage
is split safely.  This means that the hugepage is not split if not
necessary.

Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1521548069-24758-1-git-send-email-imbrenda@linux.vnet.ibm.com
Signed-off-by: Claudio Imbrenda <imbrenda@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Co-authored-by: Gerald Schaefer <gerald.schaefer@de.ibm.com>
Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com>
Cc: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>
Cc: Kirill A. Shutemov <kirill.shutemov@linux.intel.com>
Cc: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
Cc: Christian Borntraeger <borntraeger@de.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 28 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/mm/ksm.c b/mm/ksm.c
index 0f421a9b7277..b810839200be 100644
--- a/mm/ksm.c
+++ b/mm/ksm.c
@@ -2089,8 +2089,22 @@ static void cmp_and_merge_page(struct page *page, struct rmap_item *rmap_item)
 	tree_rmap_item =
 		unstable_tree_search_insert(rmap_item, page, &tree_page);
 	if (tree_rmap_item) {
+		bool split;
+
 		kpage = try_to_merge_two_pages(rmap_item, page,
 						tree_rmap_item, tree_page);
+		/*
+		 * If both pages we tried to merge belong to the same compound
+		 * page, then we actually ended up increasing the reference
+		 * count of the same compound page twice, and split_huge_page
+		 * failed.
+		 * Here we set a flag if that happened, and we use it later to
+		 * try split_huge_page again. Since we call put_page right
+		 * afterwards, the reference count will be correct and
+		 * split_huge_page should succeed.
+		 */
+		split = PageTransCompound(page)
+			&& compound_head(page) == compound_head(tree_page);
 		put_page(tree_page);
 		if (kpage) {
 			/*
@@ -2117,6 +2131,20 @@ static void cmp_and_merge_page(struct page *page, struct rmap_item *rmap_item)
 				break_cow(tree_rmap_item);
 				break_cow(rmap_item);
 			}
+		} else if (split) {
+			/*
+			 * We are here if we tried to merge two pages and
+			 * failed because they both belonged to the same
+			 * compound page. We will split the page now, but no
+			 * merging will take place.
+			 * We do not want to add the cost of a full lock; if
+			 * the page is locked, it is better to skip it and
+			 * perhaps try again later.
+			 */
+			if (!trylock_page(page))
+				return;
+			split_huge_page(page);
+			unlock_page(page);
 		}
 	}
 }