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authorHugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com>2009-01-06 17:39:37 -0500
committerLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>2009-01-06 18:59:03 -0500
commit68bdc8d64742ccc5e340c5d122ebbab3f0cf2a74 (patch)
tree1187bba5722e99f00dbba555f17026c63b0b88f9 /Documentation
parenta2c43eed8334e878702fca713b212ae2a11d84b9 (diff)
mm: try_to_unuse check removing right swap
There's a possible race in try_to_unuse() which Nick Piggin led me to two years ago. Where it does lock_page() after read_swap_cache_async(), what if another task removed that page from swapcache just before we locked it? It would sail though the (*swap_map > 1) tests doing nothing (because it could not have been removed from swapcache before its swap references were gone), until it reaches the delete_from_swap_cache(page) near the bottom. Now imagine that this page has been allocated to swap on a different swap area while we dropped page lock (perhaps at the top, perhaps in unuse_mm): we could wrongly remove from swap cache before the page has been written to swap, so a subsequent do_swap_page() would read in stale data from swap. I think this case could not happen before: remove_exclusive_swap_page() refused while page count was raised. But now with reuse_swap_page() and try_to_free_swap() removing from swap cache without minding page count, I think it could happen - the previous patch argued that it was safe because try_to_unuse() already ignored page count, but overlooked that it might be breaking the assumptions in try_to_unuse() itself. Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com> Cc: Lee Schermerhorn <lee.schermerhorn@hp.com> Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com> Cc: Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au> Cc: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com> Cc: Robin Holt <holt@sgi.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
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