Re: [PATCH v8 09/15] mm: Remove locking mf_mutex in is_raw_hwpoison_page_in_hugepage()

On 8/4/2026 9:58 AM, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 04, 2026 at 12: 36: 00PM -0400, Gregory Price wrote: > On 
> Fri, Jul 31, 2026 at 09: 07: 54PM +0100, Matthew Wilcox (Oracle) wrote: 
>  > > Sleeping in this kind of predicate is unexpected. Add a new 
> spinlock > > to protect
> 
> 
> On Tue, Aug 04, 2026 at 12:36:00PM -0400, Gregory Price wrote:
>> On Fri, Jul 31, 2026 at 09:07:54PM +0100, Matthew Wilcox (Oracle) wrote:
>> > Sleeping in this kind of predicate is unexpected.  Add a new spinlock
>> > to protect access to the list, and turn it into a normal singly linked
>> > list now that it doesn't need to be a lockless list.
>> 
>> Out of curiosity, wouldn't sleeping in this context not just be
>> unexpected but theoretically cause issues? (mid-poison, sleep, scheduled
>> process generates more poison on the same page...) - at a minimum this
>> takes a thread out of the future potential poison-generating pool?
> 
> A reasonable question.  We don't try to handle races terribly well --
> hwpoison can be generated asynchronously by patrol scrub, so it's always
> going to be possible for a thread to hit poison on something that the
> kernel didn't know about.
> 
> What we're trying to do is avoid touching memory which we already knew
> to be poisoned, while also permitting touching memory which we haven't
> been told is poison.
> 
> I see the locking in here as preventing list corruption and UAF rather
> than preventing races.  I'm also considering that we're now exposing this
> mutex fairly directly to userspace -- before it was only being touched
> through some fairly weird mechanisms like reading kcore.  With this
> patch series, every call to read() potentially touches this mutex.
> And that could hold off recording any hwpoison for some time, not to
> mention serialising all other calls to read() on a given folio.
> 
> So we have all manner of protections that prevent us from taking this mutex
> -- the folio must have a hwpoison page in it and must be hugetlb, but at
> the end of the day, one can still be preempted while holding a mutex and
> we never know when we might want to call this from a non-sleepable context.
> 
> I'd be open to arguments that this should be an rwlock rather than
> a spinlock.  Or figure out a way to shard the lock per folio (lockdep
> etc make it very hard to embed a spinlock in struct folio).  I think
> it'd also be profitable to change how we record poison for hugetlb to
> not need locking or memory allocation.
> 
> But this is all a very long way from where I want to be working -- cleaning
> up the page fault path.  I think I've made a reasonable set of improvements
> here, and somebody else can come along later to make the code even better.
> 

We don't go down the path examining the raw_hwp_list unless the hugetlb 
folio is poisoned which is a rare event, given that, I felt the lock is 
fine.

thanks,
-jane