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fix page->count discrepancy for zero page

PATCH New Dave Hansen 1 participant 1 message Jun 28, 2004

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PATCH 1/1 fix page->count discrepancy for zero page

While writing some analysis tools for memory hot-remove, we came across a single page which had a ->count that always increased, without bound. It ended up always being the zero page, and it was caused by a leaked reference in some do_wp_page() code that ends up avoiding PG_reserved pages.

Basically what happens is that page_cache_release()/put_page() ignore PG_reserved pages, while page_cache_get()/get_page() go ahead and take the reference. So, each time there's a COW fault on the zero-page, you get a leaked page->count increment.

It's pretty rare to have a COW fault on anything that's PG_reserved, in fact, I can't think of anything else that this applies to other than the zero page.

In any case, it the bug doesn't cause any real problems, but it is a bit of an annoyance and is obviously incorrect. We've been running with this patch for about 3 months now, and haven't run into any problems with it.

Attached patch is against 2.6.7 and applies to -mm3 properly.

-- Dave

mm/memory.c +2 -1
diff -urp linux-2.6.7/mm/memory.c linux-2.6.7-zpage/mm/memory.c
@@ -1064,7 +1064,8 @@ static int do_wp_page(struct mm_struct *
 	/*
 	 * Ok, we need to copy. Oh, well..
 	 */
-	page_cache_get(old_page);
+	if (!PageReserved(old_page))
+		page_cache_get(old_page);
 	spin_unlock(&mm->page_table_lock);
 
 	if (unlikely(anon_vma_prepare(vma)))