• Dave Hansen's avatar
    [PATCH] fix page->count discrepancy for zero page · 8bfb7092
    Dave Hansen authored
    While writing some analysis tools for memory hot-remove, we came across a
    single page which had a ->count that always increased, without bound.  It
    ended up always being the zero page, and it was caused by a leaked
    reference in some do_wp_page() code that ends up avoiding PG_reserved
    pages.
    
    Basically what happens is that page_cache_release()/put_page() ignore
    PG_reserved pages, while page_cache_get()/get_page() go ahead and take the
    reference.  So, each time there's a COW fault on the zero-page, you get a
    leaked page->count increment.
    
    It's pretty rare to have a COW fault on anything that's PG_reserved, in
    fact, I can't think of anything else that this applies to other than the
    zero page.
    
    In any case, it the bug doesn't cause any real problems, but it is a bit of
    an annoyance and is obviously incorrect.  We've been running with this
    patch for about 3 months now, and haven't run into any problems with it.
    Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
    8bfb7092
memory.c 47.3 KB