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mm/mremap: Honour writable bit in mremap pte batching

PATCH Applied Dev Jain 4 participants 4 messages Oct 28, 2025

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Dev Jain

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#0 lore raw

PATCH 1/1 mm/mremap: Honour writable bit in mremap pte batching

Currently mremap folio pte batch ignores the writable bit during figuring out a set of similar ptes mapping the same folio. Suppose that the first pte of the batch is writable while the others are not - set_ptes will end up setting the writable bit on the other ptes, which is a violation of mremap semantics. Therefore, use FPB_RESPECT_WRITE to check the writable bit while determining the pte batch.

Fixes f822a9a81a31 ("mm: optimize mremap() by PTE batching")

---
mm-selftests pass. Based on mm-new. Need David H. to confirm whether the repro passes.

 mm/mremap.c | 2 +-
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)
mm/mremap.c +1 -1
index a7f531c17b79..8ad06cf50783 100644
@@ -187,7 +187,7 @@ static int mremap_folio_pte_batch(struct vm_area_struct *vma, unsigned long addr
 	if (!folio || !folio_test_large(folio))
 		return 1;
 
-	return folio_pte_batch(folio, ptep, pte, max_nr);
+	return folio_pte_batch_flags(folio, NULL, ptep, &pte, max_nr, FPB_RESPECT_WRITE);
 }
 
 static int move_ptes(struct pagetable_move_control *pmc,
Signature · 1 line
2.30.2
reviewer Acked-by on v1 1/1
#1 lore raw
Quoted 7 lines · Dev Jain

Currently mremap folio pte batch ignores the writable bit during figuring out a set of similar ptes mapping the same folio. Suppose that the first pte of the batch is writable while the others are not - set_ptes will end up setting the writable bit on the other ptes, which is a violation of mremap semantics. Therefore, use FPB_RESPECT_WRITE to check the writable bit while determining the pte batch.

Hmm, it seems to be like we're doing the wrong thing by default here? I must admit I haven't followed the contpte work as much as I would've liked, but it doesn't make much sense to me why FPB_RESPECT_WRITE would be an option you have to explicitly pass, and where folio_pte_batch (the "simple" interface) doesn't Just Do The Right Thing for naive callers.

Auditing all callers:
- khugepaged clears a variable number of ptes
- memory.c clears a variable number of ptes
- mempolicy.c grabs folios for migrations
- mlock.c steps over nr_ptes - 1 ptes, speeding up traversal
- mremap is borked since we're remapping nr_ptes ptes
- rmap.c TTU unmaps nr_ptes ptes for a given folio

so while the vast majority of callers don't seem to care, it would make sense that folio_pte_batch() works conservatively by default, and folio_pte_batch_flags() would allow for further batching (or maybe we would add a separate folio_pte_batch_clear() or folio_pte_batch_greedy() or whatnot).

Quoted 5 lines
Fixes f822a9a81a31 ("mm: optimize mremap() by PTE batching")

But the solution itself looks okay to me. so, fwiw:

Signature · 1 line
Pedro
#2 lore raw
Quoted 9 lines · Pedro Falcato
Quoted 7 lines · Dev Jain

Currently mremap folio pte batch ignores the writable bit during figuring out a set of similar ptes mapping the same folio. Suppose that the first pte of the batch is writable while the others are not - set_ptes will end up setting the writable bit on the other ptes, which is a violation of mremap semantics. Therefore, use FPB_RESPECT_WRITE to check the writable bit while determining the pte batch.

Quoted 5 lines

Hmm, it seems to be like we're doing the wrong thing by default here? I must admit I haven't followed the contpte work as much as I would've liked, but it doesn't make much sense to me why FPB_RESPECT_WRITE would be an option you have to explicitly pass, and where folio_pte_batch (the "simple" interface) doesn't Just Do The Right Thing for naive callers.

We use the "simple" version to apply to as many callers as possible: the common case, not some "let's be super careful" scenarios.

Quoted 9 lines

Auditing all callers:
- khugepaged clears a variable number of ptes
- memory.c clears a variable number of ptes
- mempolicy.c grabs folios for migrations
- mlock.c steps over nr_ptes - 1 ptes, speeding up traversal
- mremap is borked since we're remapping nr_ptes ptes
- rmap.c TTU unmaps nr_ptes ptes for a given folio

Quoted 5 lines

so while the vast majority of callers don't seem to care, it would make sense that folio_pte_batch() works conservatively by default, and folio_pte_batch_flags() would allow for further batching (or maybe we would add a separate folio_pte_batch_clear() or folio_pte_batch_greedy() or whatnot).

I think really the tricky part is when we'e not only scanning or clearing, but actually want to "set" ptes again based on the result, like we do here.

For that we could consider having a second variant. But if it ends up having only a single caller, it's also not that great.

Quoted 11 lines
Quoted 6 lines
Fixes f822a9a81a31 ("mm: optimize mremap() by PTE batching")

But the solution itself looks okay to me. so, fwiw:

Backport might end up being a bit tricky I suspect.

Signature · 3 lines
Cheers

David / dhildenb
Reviewed-by on v1 1/1
#3 lore raw
In reply to Dev Jain

You'll probably get a tag just from using the British English spelling of 'honour' from me :P (joking! ;)

Quoted 6 lines · Dev Jain

Currently mremap folio pte batch ignores the writable bit during figuring out a set of similar ptes mapping the same folio. Suppose that the first pte of the batch is writable while the others are not - set_ptes will end up setting the writable bit on the other ptes, which is a violation of mremap semantics. Therefore, use FPB_RESPECT_WRITE to check the writable bit while determining the pte batch.

Yikes.

Quoted 6 lines
Fixes f822a9a81a31 ("mm: optimize mremap() by PTE batching")

LGTM, so:

Quoted 3 lines

---
mm-selftests pass. Based on mm-new. Need David H. to confirm whether the repro passes.

Given he A-b'd I assume it did :)

Quoted 20 lines
 mm/mremap.c | 2 +-
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)
mm/mremap.c +1 -2
index a7f531c17b79..8ad06cf50783 100644
@@ -187,7 +187,7 @@ static int mremap_folio_pte_batch(struct vm_area_struct *vma, unsigned long addr
 	if (!folio || !folio_test_large(folio))
 		return 1;
 
-	return folio_pte_batch(folio, ptep, pte, max_nr);
+	return folio_pte_batch_flags(folio, NULL, ptep, &pte, max_nr, FPB_RESPECT_WRITE);
 }
 
 static int move_ptes(struct pagetable_move_control *pmc,
--

2.30.2