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Subject[PATCH] Skip memory holes in FLATMEM when reading /proc/pagetypeinfo (resend)
This is a resend. The last patch went to Russell King with lkml cc'd as I
wasn't subscribed to the linux-arm list. However, I haven't heard it being
picked up so trying linux-arm this time.

===

Ordinarily, memory holes in flatmem still have a valid memmap and is safe
to use. However, an architecture (ARM) frees up the memmap backing memory
holes on the assumption it is never used. /proc/pagetypeinfo reads the
whole range of pages in a zone believing that the memmap is valid and that
pfn_valid will return false if it is not. On ARM, freeing the memmap breaks
the page->zone linkages even though pfn_valid() returns true and the kernel
can oops shortly afterwards due to accessing a bogus struct zone *.

This patch lets architectures say when FLATMEM can have holes in the
memmap. Rather than an expensive check for valid memory, /proc/pagetypeinfo
will confirm that the page linkages are still valid by checking page->zone
is still the expected zone. The lookup of page_zone is safe as there is a
limited range of memory that is accessed when calling page_zone. Even if
page_zone happens to return the correct zone, the impact is that the counters
in /proc/pagetypeinfo are slightly off but fragmentation monitoring is
unlikely to be relevant on an embedded system.

Reported-by: H Hartley Sweeten <hsweeten@visionengravers.com>
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
Tested-by: H Hartley Sweeten <hsweeten@visionengravers.com>

diff --git a/arch/arm/Kconfig b/arch/arm/Kconfig
index 4b8acd2..70dba16 100644
--- a/arch/arm/Kconfig
+++ b/arch/arm/Kconfig
@@ -810,6 +810,11 @@ config OABI_COMPAT
UNPREDICTABLE (in fact it can be predicted that it won't work
at all). If in doubt say Y.

+config ARCH_FLATMEM_HAS_HOLES
+ bool
+ default y
+ depends on FLATMEM
+
config ARCH_DISCONTIGMEM_ENABLE
bool
default (ARCH_LH7A40X && !LH7A40X_CONTIGMEM)
diff --git a/mm/vmstat.c b/mm/vmstat.c
index b0d08e6..98aa882 100644
--- a/mm/vmstat.c
+++ b/mm/vmstat.c
@@ -516,9 +516,26 @@ static void pagetypeinfo_showblockcount_print(struct seq_file *m,
continue;

page = pfn_to_page(pfn);
+#ifdef CONFIG_ARCH_FLATMEM_HAS_HOLES
+ /*
+ * Ordinarily, memory holes in flatmem still have a valid
+ * memmap for the PFN range. However, an architecture for
+ * embedded systems (e.g. ARM) can free up the memmap backing
+ * holes to save memory on the assumption the memmap is
+ * never used. The page_zone linkages are then broken even
+ * though pfn_valid() returns true. Skip the page if the
+ * linkages are broken. Even if this test passed, the impact
+ * is that the counters for the movable type are off but
+ * fragmentation monitoring is likely meaningless on small
+ * systems.
+ */
+ if (page_zone(page) != zone)
+ continue;
+#endif
mtype = get_pageblock_migratetype(page);

- count[mtype]++;
+ if (mtype < MIGRATE_TYPES)
+ count[mtype]++;
}

/* Print counts */
--
Mel Gorman
Part-time Phd Student Linux Technology Center
University of Limerick IBM Dublin Software Lab

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