Otherwise we might be mapping in a page in a new mapping, but that page
(through the swapcache) would later be mapped into an old mapping too.
The page->mapping must be the case that works for everybody, not just
the mapping that happened to page it in first.
Here's the scenario:
- page gets allocated/mapped by process A. Let's call the anon_vma we
associate the page with 'A' to keep it easy to track.
- Process A forks, creating process B. The anon_vma in B is 'B', and has
a chain that looks like 'B' -> 'A'. Everything is fine.
- Swapping happens. The page (with mapping pointing to 'A') gets swapped
out (perhaps not to disk - it's enough to assume that it's just not
mapped any more, and lives entirely in the swap-cache)
- Process B pages it in, which goes like this:
do_swap_page ->
page = lookup_swap_cache(entry);
...
set_pte_at(mm, address, page_table, pte);
page_add_anon_rmap(page, vma, address);
And think about what happens here!
In particular, what happens is that this will now be the "first"
mapping of that page, so page_add_anon_rmap() used to do
if (first)
__page_set_anon_rmap(page, vma, address);
and notice what anon_vma it will use? It will use the anon_vma for
process B!
What happens then? Trivial: process 'A' also pages it in (nothing
happens, it's not the first mapping), and then process 'B' execve's
or exits or unmaps, making anon_vma B go away.
End result: process A has a page that points to anon_vma B, but
anon_vma B does not exist any more. This can go on forever. Forget
about RCU grace periods, forget about locking, forget anything like
that. The bug is simply that page->mapping points to an anon_vma
that was correct at one point, but was _not_ the one that was shared
by all users of that possible mapping.
Changing it to always use the deepest anon_vma in the anonvma chain gets
us to the safest model.
This can be improved in certain cases: if we know the page is private to
just this particular mapping (for example, it's a new page, or it is the
only swapcache entry), we could pick the top (most specific) anon_vma.
But that's a future optimization. Make it _work_ reliably first.
Reviewed-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Acked-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Tested-by: Borislav Petkov <bp@alien8.de> [ "What do you know, I think you fixed it!" ]
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
ea90002b0f