mm/vmscan: flush deferred TLB before freeing large folios in reclaim

Hi,

We were chasing random user-space segfaults on our production kernels. They were fully non-deterministic, and the fault address reported for each SIGSEGV was itself random and had nothing to do with the code that was actually running -- which smells like a stale TLB entry, not corrupted data.

We managed to reproduce it with stress-ng: under memory pressure the workers take random SIGSEGV/SIGILL too, again at random fault addresses.

It turns out we're missing a TLB flush. In reclaim, shrink_folio_list() tears down the PTEs with a deferred, batched flush. Order-0 folios are collected and only freed after that batch is flushed by try_to_unmap_flush(). Large folios, though, are freed right away at the free_it label via destroy_large_folio(), which runs *before* the flush. So a large folio's pages can go back to the allocator and get reused while some other CPU still has a stale TLB entry pointing at them -- and that CPU then reads or executes through the old translation into a page that now belongs to someone else. When it's executable text mapped as a large folio, the CPU literally fetches instructions out of a reused page, which is where the random crashes come from. (This is about file-backed large folios, not anonymous THP, so transparent_hugepage=never doesn't help.)

How we reproduce it:
- Make a cgroup and set memory.high.
- Run ~45 stress-ng workers in it (e.g. --cpu N --cpu-method all).
- Alongside, run a tiny program that keeps allocating anonymous memory to push the cgroup over memory.high and keep reclaim busy.
Dropping caches first (echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches) makes the text refault as large folios and reproduces it much faster.

To be 100% sure about the mechanism, we filled every reclaimed large folio with 0xCC (INT3) and held onto it instead of freeing it. Under the repro, stress-ng workers immediately hit INT3 at instruction pointers inside their own text -- i.e. CPUs were fetching instructions through stale TLB entries from freed, poisoned pages. stress-ng has no INT3 in its binary, so the only way to execute one is through a stale translation into a freed page. Several CPUs hit it within the same microsecond, which lines up nicely with a single batched unmap whose flush was skipped on more than one CPU.

Upstream this got fixed as a side effect of
commit bc2ff4cbc329 ("mm: free folios in a batch in shrink_folio_list()") which sends large folios down the same flush-before-free batch path.

The patch below is the minimal fix: just flush the deferred batch before freeing a large folio inline.

Jiayuan Chen (1):
mm/vmscan: flush deferred TLB before freeing large folios

 mm/vmscan.c | 6 ++++--
 1 file changed, 4 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)

2.43.0