Patch "mm/cgroup: avoid panic when init with low memory" has been added to the 4.9-stable tree

This is a note to let you know that I've just added the patch titled

mm/cgroup: avoid panic when init with low memory

to the 4.9-stable tree which can be found at:
http://www.kernel.org/git/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/stable-queue.git;a=summary

The filename of the patch is:
mm-cgroup-avoid-panic-when-init-with-low-memory.patch
and it can be found in the queue-4.9 subdirectory.

If you, or anyone else, feels it should not be added to the stable tree, please let <[email protected]> know about it.

From: Laurent Dufour <[email protected]>
Date: Thu, 9 Mar 2017 16:17:06 -0800
Subject: mm/cgroup: avoid panic when init with low memory

From: Laurent Dufour <[email protected]>

[ Upstream commit bfc7228b9a9647e1c353e50b40297a2929801759 ]

The system may panic when initialisation is done when almost all the memory is assigned to the huge pages using the kernel command line parameter hugepage=xxxx. Panic may occur like this:

  Unable to handle kernel paging request for data at address 0x00000000
  Faulting instruction address: 0xc000000000302b88
  Oops: Kernel access of bad area, sig: 11 [#1]
  SMP NR_CPUS=2048 [    0.082424] NUMA
  pSeries
  Modules linked in:
  CPU: 0 PID: 1 Comm: swapper/0 Not tainted 4.9.0-15-generic #16-Ubuntu
  task: c00000021ed01600 task.stack: c00000010d108000
  NIP: c000000000302b88 LR: c000000000270e04 CTR: c00000000016cfd0
  REGS: c00000010d10b2c0 TRAP: 0300   Not tainted (4.9.0-15-generic)
  MSR: 8000000002009033 <SF,VEC,EE,ME,IR,DR,RI,LE>[ 0.082770]   CR: 28424422  XER: 00000000
  CFAR: c0000000003d28b8 DAR: 0000000000000000 DSISR: 40000000 SOFTE: 1
  GPR00: c000000000270e04 c00000010d10b540 c00000000141a300 c00000010fff6300
  GPR04: 0000000000000000 00000000026012c0 c00000010d10b630 0000000487ab0000
  GPR08: 000000010ee90000 c000000001454fd8 0000000000000000 0000000000000000
  GPR12: 0000000000004400 c00000000fb80000 00000000026012c0 00000000026012c0
  GPR16: 00000000026012c0 0000000000000000 0000000000000000 0000000000000002
  GPR20: 000000000000000c 0000000000000000 0000000000000000 00000000024200c0
  GPR24: c0000000016eef48 0000000000000000 c00000010fff7d00 00000000026012c0
  GPR28: 0000000000000000 c00000010fff7d00 c00000010fff6300 c00000010d10b6d0
  NIP mem_cgroup_soft_limit_reclaim+0xf8/0x4f0
  LR do_try_to_free_pages+0x1b4/0x450
  Call Trace:
    do_try_to_free_pages+0x1b4/0x450
    try_to_free_pages+0xf8/0x270
    __alloc_pages_nodemask+0x7a8/0xff0
    new_slab+0x104/0x8e0
    ___slab_alloc+0x620/0x700
    __slab_alloc+0x34/0x60
    kmem_cache_alloc_node_trace+0xdc/0x310
    mem_cgroup_init+0x158/0x1c8
    do_one_initcall+0x68/0x1d0
    kernel_init_freeable+0x278/0x360
    kernel_init+0x24/0x170
    ret_from_kernel_thread+0x5c/0x74
  Instruction dump:
  eb81ffe0 eba1ffe8 ebc1fff0 ebe1fff8 4e800020 3d230001 e9499a42 3d220004
  3929acd8 794a1f24 7d295214 eac90100 <e9360000> 2fa90000 419eff74 3b200000
  ---[ end trace 342f5208b00d01b6 ]---

This is a chicken and egg issue where the kernel try to get free memory when allocating per node data in mem_cgroup_init(), but in that path mem_cgroup_soft_limit_reclaim() is called which assumes that these data are allocated.

As mem_cgroup_soft_limit_reclaim() is best effort, it should return when these data are not yet allocated.

This patch also fixes potential null pointer access in mem_cgroup_remove_from_trees() and mem_cgroup_update_tree().

---
 mm/memcontrol.c |    7 +++++--
 1 file changed, 5 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)

@@ -462,6 +462,8 @@ static void mem_cgroup_update_tree(struc
 	struct mem_cgroup_tree_per_node *mctz;
 
 	mctz = soft_limit_tree_from_page(page);
+	if (!mctz)
+		return;
 	/*
 	 * Necessary to update all ancestors when hierarchy is used.
 	 * because their event counter is not touched.

@@ -499,7 +501,8 @@ static void mem_cgroup_remove_from_trees
 	for_each_node(nid) {
 		mz = mem_cgroup_nodeinfo(memcg, nid);
 		mctz = soft_limit_tree_node(nid);
-		mem_cgroup_remove_exceeded(mz, mctz);
+		if (mctz)
+			mem_cgroup_remove_exceeded(mz, mctz);
 	}
 }
 

@@ -2565,7 +2568,7 @@ unsigned long mem_cgroup_soft_limit_recl
 	 * is empty. Do it lockless to prevent lock bouncing. Races
 	 * are acceptable as soft limit is best effort anyway.
 	 */
-	if (RB_EMPTY_ROOT(&mctz->rb_root))
+	if (!mctz || RB_EMPTY_ROOT(&mctz->rb_root))
 		return 0;
 
 	/*

Patches currently in stable-queue which might be from [email protected] are

queue-4.9/mm-cgroup-avoid-panic-when-init-with-low-memory.patch