Re: [PATCH 1/1] mm/thp: fix MTE tag mismatch when replacing zero-filled subpages
From: Zi Yan <ziy@nvidia.com>
Date: 2025-09-22 02:36:38
Also in:
linux-mediatek, linux-mm, lkml, stable
On 21 Sep 2025, at 22:14, Lance Yang wrote:
From: Lance Yang <lance.yang@linux.dev> When both THP and MTE are enabled, splitting a THP and replacing its zero-filled subpages with the shared zeropage can cause MTE tag mismatch faults in userspace. Remapping zero-filled subpages to the shared zeropage is unsafe, as the zeropage has a fixed tag of zero, which may not match the tag expected by the userspace pointer. KSM already avoids this problem by using memcmp_pages(), which on arm64 intentionally reports MTE-tagged pages as non-identical to prevent unsafe merging. As suggested by David[1], this patch adopts the same pattern, replacing the memchr_inv() byte-level check with a call to pages_identical(). This leverages existing architecture-specific logic to determine if a page is truly identical to the shared zeropage. Having both the THP shrinker and KSM rely on pages_identical() makes the design more future-proof, IMO. Instead of handling quirks in generic code, we just let the architecture decide what makes two pages identical. [1] https://lore.kernel.org/all/ca2106a3-4bb2-4457-81af-301fd99fbef4@redhat.com (local) Cc: <redacted> Reported-by: Qun-wei Lin <redacted> Closes: https://lore.kernel.org/all/a7944523fcc3634607691c35311a5d59d1a3f8d4.camel@mediatek.com (local) Fixes: b1f202060afe ("mm: remap unused subpages to shared zeropage when splitting isolated thp") Suggested-by: David Hildenbrand <redacted> Signed-off-by: Lance Yang <lance.yang@linux.dev> --- Tested on x86_64 and on QEMU for arm64 (with and without MTE support), and the fix works as expected.
From [1], I see you mentioned RISC-V also has the address masking feature. Is it affected by this? And memcmp_pages() is only implemented by ARM64 for MTE. Should any arch with address masking always implement it to avoid the same issue?
quoted hunk ↗ jump to hunk
mm/huge_memory.c | 15 +++------------ mm/migrate.c | 8 +------- 2 files changed, 4 insertions(+), 19 deletions(-)diff --git a/mm/huge_memory.c b/mm/huge_memory.c index 32e0ec2dde36..28d4b02a1aa5 100644 --- a/mm/huge_memory.c +++ b/mm/huge_memory.c@@ -4104,29 +4104,20 @@ static unsigned long deferred_split_count(struct shrinker *shrink, static bool thp_underused(struct folio *folio) { int num_zero_pages = 0, num_filled_pages = 0; - void *kaddr; int i; for (i = 0; i < folio_nr_pages(folio); i++) { - kaddr = kmap_local_folio(folio, i * PAGE_SIZE); - if (!memchr_inv(kaddr, 0, PAGE_SIZE)) { - num_zero_pages++; - if (num_zero_pages > khugepaged_max_ptes_none) { - kunmap_local(kaddr); + if (pages_identical(folio_page(folio, i), ZERO_PAGE(0))) { + if (++num_zero_pages > khugepaged_max_ptes_none) return true; - } } else { /* * Another path for early exit once the number * of non-zero filled pages exceeds threshold. */ - num_filled_pages++; - if (num_filled_pages >= HPAGE_PMD_NR - khugepaged_max_ptes_none) { - kunmap_local(kaddr); + if (++num_filled_pages >= HPAGE_PMD_NR - khugepaged_max_ptes_none) return false; - } } - kunmap_local(kaddr); } return false; }diff --git a/mm/migrate.c b/mm/migrate.c index aee61a980374..ce83c2c3c287 100644 --- a/mm/migrate.c +++ b/mm/migrate.c@@ -300,9 +300,7 @@ static bool try_to_map_unused_to_zeropage(struct page_vma_mapped_walk *pvmw, unsigned long idx) { struct page *page = folio_page(folio, idx); - bool contains_data; pte_t newpte; - void *addr; if (PageCompound(page)) return false;@@ -319,11 +317,7 @@ static bool try_to_map_unused_to_zeropage(struct page_vma_mapped_walk *pvmw, * this subpage has been non present. If the subpage is only zero-filled * then map it to the shared zeropage. */ - addr = kmap_local_page(page); - contains_data = memchr_inv(addr, 0, PAGE_SIZE); - kunmap_local(addr); - - if (contains_data) + if (!pages_identical(page, ZERO_PAGE(0))) return false; newpte = pte_mkspecial(pfn_pte(my_zero_pfn(pvmw->address),-- 2.49.0
The changes look good to me. Thanks. Acked-by: Zi Yan [off-list ref] -- Best Regards, Yan, Zi