On Wed, Aug 29, 2012 at 04:58:45PM -0500, Seth Jennings wrote:

This patch fixes a race condition that results in memory
corruption when using cleancache.

The race exists between the zcache shrinker handler,
shrink_zcache_memory() and cleancache_get_page().

In most cases, the shrinker will both evict a zbpg
from its buddy list and flush it from tmem before a
cleancache_get_page() occurs on that page. A subsequent
cleancache_get_page() will fail in the tmem layer.

In the rare case that two occur together and the
cleancache_get_page() path gets through the tmem
layer before the shrinker path can flush tmem,
zbud_decompress() does a check to see if the zbpg is a
"zombie", i.e. not on a buddy list, which means the shrinker
is in the process of reclaiming it. If the zbpg is a zombie,
zbud_decompress() returns -EINVAL.

However, this return code is being ignored by the caller,
zcache_pampd_get_data_and_free(), which results in the
caller of cleancache_get_page() thinking that the page has
been properly retrieved when it has not.

This patch modifies zcache_pampd_get_data_and_free() to
convey the failure up the stack so that the caller of
cleancache_get_page() knows the page retrieval failed.

---
Based on v3.6-rc3.

This needs to be applied to stable trees as well.
zcache-main.c was named zcache.c before v3.1, so
I'm not sure how you want to handle trees earlier
than that.

Signed-off-by: Seth Jennings <redacted>

Reviewed-by: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>

Thanks!

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