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Commit 16af97dc authored by Nadav Amit's avatar Nadav Amit Committed by Linus Torvalds
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mm: migrate: prevent racy access to tlb_flush_pending

Patch series "fixes of TLB batching races", v6.

It turns out that Linux TLB batching mechanism suffers from various
races.  Races that are caused due to batching during reclamation were
recently handled by Mel and this patch-set deals with others.  The more
fundamental issue is that concurrent updates of the page-tables allow
for TLB flushes to be batched on one core, while another core changes
the page-tables.  This other core may assume a PTE change does not
require a flush based on the updated PTE value, while it is unaware that
TLB flushes are still pending.

This behavior affects KSM (which may result in memory corruption) and
MADV_FREE and MADV_DONTNEED (which may result in incorrect behavior).  A
proof-of-concept can easily produce the wrong behavior of MADV_DONTNEED.
Memory corruption in KSM is harder to produce in practice, but was
observed by hacking the kernel and adding a delay before flushing and
replacing the KSM page.

Finally, there is...
parent 9eeb52ae
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