On Tue 14-05-19 14:30:05, Anshuman Khandual wrote:

The arm64 pagetable dump code can race with concurrent modification of the
kernel page tables. When a leaf entries are modified concurrently, the dump
code may log stale or inconsistent information for a VA range, but this is
otherwise not harmful.

When intermediate levels of table are freed, the dump code will continue to
use memory which has been freed and potentially reallocated for another
purpose. In such cases, the dump code may dereference bogus addressses,
leading to a number of potential problems.

Intermediate levels of table may by freed during memory hot-remove, or when
installing a huge mapping in the vmalloc region. To avoid racing with these
cases, take the memory hotplug lock when walking the kernel page table.

Why is this a problem only on arm64 and why do we even care for debugfs?
Does anybody rely on this thing to be reliable? Do we even need it? Who
is using the file?

I am asking because I would really love to make mem hotplug locking less
scattered outside of the core MM than more. Most users simply shouldn't
care. Pfn walkers should rely on pfn_to_online_page.

-- 
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs

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