Building under memory pressure, with KSM on 2.6.36-rc5, collapsed with
an internal compiler error: typically indicating an error in swapping.
Perhaps there's a timing issue which makes it now more likely, perhaps
it's just a long time since I tried for so long: this bug goes back to
KSM swapping in 2.6.33.
Notice how reuse_swap_page() allows an exclusive page to be reused, but
only does SetPageDirty if it can delete it from swap cache right then -
if it's currently under Writeback, it has to be left in cache and we
don't SetPageDirty, but the page can be reused. Fine, the dirty bit
will get set in the pte; but notice how zap_pte_range() does not bother
to transfer pte_dirty to page_dirty when unmapping a PageAnon.
If KSM chooses to share such a page, it will look like a clean copy of
swapcache, and not be written out to swap when its memory is needed;
then stale data read back from swap when it's needed again.
We could fix this in reuse_swap_page() (or even refuse to reuse a
page under writeback), but it's more honest to fix my oversight in
KSM's write_protect_page(). Several days of testing on three machines
confirms that this fixes the issue they showed.
Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com>
Cc: stable@kernel.org
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
4e31635c36