Date: Wed, 7 Aug 2013 14:27:55 -0700
From: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
To: Ed Cashin <ecashin@coraid.com>, <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
        Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>, linux-mm@kvack.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH] aoe: adjust ref of head for compound page tails
Message-Id: <20130807142755.5cd89e02e4286f7dca88b80d@linux-foundation.org>
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On Wed, 7 Aug 2013 14:18:35 -0700 Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> wrote:

> On Wed, 7 Aug 2013 17:12:36 -0400 Ed Cashin <ecashin@coraid.com> wrote:
> 
> > 
> > On Aug 7, 2013, at 4:58 PM, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > 
> > > On Thu, 1 Aug 2013 21:29:59 -0400 Ed Cashin <ecashin@coraid.com> wrote:
> > > 
> > >> As discussed previously,
> > > 
> > > I think I missed that.
> > > 
> > >> the fact that some users of the block
> > >> layer provide bios that point to pages with a zero _count means
> > >> that it is not OK for the network layer to do a put_page on the
> > >> skb frags during an skb_linearize, so the aoe driver gets a
> > >> reference to pages in bios and puts the reference before ending
> > >> the bio.  And because it cannot use get_page on a page with a
> > >> zero _count, it manipulates the value directly.
> > > 
> > > Eh?  What code is putting count==0 pages into bios?  That sounds very
> > > weird and broken.
> > 
> > I thought so in 2007 but couldn't solicit a clear "this is wrong" consensus from the discussion.
> > 
> >   http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/499197
> >   https://lkml.org/lkml/2007/1/19/56
> >   https://lkml.org/lkml/2006/12/18/230
> > 
> > We were seeing zero-count pages in bios from XFS, but Christoph Hellwig pointed out that kmalloced pages can also come from ext3 when it's doing log recovery, and they'll have zero page counts.
> 
> aiiee!
> 
> It is (I suppose) reasonable to put kmalloced memory into a BIO's page
> array.  And it is perfectly reasonable for a user of that bio to do a
> get_page/put_page against that page.  It is utterly unreasonable for
> the damn page to get freed as a result!
> 
> I'd claim that slab is broken.  The page is in use, so it should have an
> elevated refcount, full stop.
> 

err, no.  slab.c uses alloc_pages(), so the underlying page indeed has
a proper refcount.  I'm still not understanding how this situation comes
about.

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