Affected: Linux

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

mm/gup: reject FOLL_SPLIT_PMD with hugetlb VMAs

Patch series "mm: fixes for device-exclusive entries (hmm)", v2.

Discussing the PageTail() call in make_device_exclusive_range() with Willy, I recently discovered [1] that device-exclusive handling does not properly work with THP, making the hmm-tests selftests fail if THPs are enabled on the system.

Looking into more details, I found that hugetlb is not properly fenced, and I realized that something that was bugging me for longer -- how device-exclusive entries interact with mapcounts -- completely breaks migration/swapout/split/hwpoison handling of these folios while they have device-exclusive PTEs.

The program below can be used to allocate 1 GiB worth of pages and making them device-exclusive on a kernel with CONFIG_TEST_HMM.

Once they are device-exclusive, these folios cannot get swapped out (proc$pid/smaps_rollup will always indicate 1 GiB RSS no matter how much one forces memory reclaim), and when having a memory block onlined to ZONE_MOVABLE, trying to offline it will loop forever and complain about failed migration of a page that should be movable.

# echo offline > /sys/devices/system/memory/memory136/state # echo online_movable > /sys/devices/system/memory/memory136/state # ./hmm-swap & ... wait until everything is device-exclusive # echo offline > /sys/devices/system/memory/memory136/state [ 285.193431][T14882] page: refcount:2 mapcount:0 mapp…