On Tue, Dec 04, 2012 at 11:24:30PM -0800, Hugh Dickins wrote:

From: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>

Commit 00442ad04a5e ("mempolicy: fix a memory corruption by refcount
imbalance in alloc_pages_vma()") changed get_vma_policy() to raise the
refcount on a shmem shared mempolicy; whereas shmem_alloc_page() went
on expecting alloc_page_vma() to drop the refcount it had acquired.
This deserves a rework: but for now fix the leak in shmem_alloc_page().

Hugh: shmem_swapin() did not need a fix, but surely it's clearer to use
the same refcounting there as in shmem_alloc_page(), delete its onstack
mempolicy, and the strange mpol_cond_copy() and __mpol_cond_copy() -
those were invented to let swapin_readahead() make an unknown number of
calls to alloc_pages_vma() with one mempolicy; but since 00442ad04a5e,
alloc_pages_vma() has kept refcount in balance, so now no problem.

Agreed. Anything that reduces the complexity of the mempolicy ref counting
is worthwhile even if it's only by a small bit.

Reported-by: Tommi Rantala <redacted>
Awaiting-signed-off-by: Mel Gorman [off-list ref]
Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org

Thanks Hugh for turning gibber into a patch!

Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>

Tommi, just in case, can you confirm this fixes the problem for you please?

-- 
Mel Gorman
SUSE Labs

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