Recently I suggested using "mount -o remount,mpol=local /tmp" in NUMA
mempolicy testing.  Very nasty.  Reading /proc/mounts, /proc/pid/mounts
or /proc/pid/mountinfo may then corrupt one bit of kernel memory, often
in a page table (causing "Bad swap" or "Bad page map" warning or "Bad
pagetable" oops), sometimes in a vm_area_struct or rbnode or somewhere
worse.  "mpol=prefer" and "mpol=prefer:Node" are equally toxic.

Recent NUMA enhancements are not to blame: this dates back to 2.6.35,
when commit e17f74af "mempolicy: don't call mpol_set_nodemask() when
no_context" skipped mpol_parse_str()'s call to mpol_set_nodemask(),
which used to initialize v.preferred_node, or set MPOL_F_LOCAL in flags.
With slab poisoning, you can then rely on mpol_to_str() to set the bit
for node 0x6b6b, probably in the next page above the caller's stack.

mpol_parse_str() is only called from shmem_parse_options(): no_context
is always true, so call it unused for now, and remove !no_context code.
Set v.nodes or v.preferred_node or MPOL_F_LOCAL as mpol_to_str() might
expect.  Then mpol_to_str() can ignore its no_context argument also,
the mpol being appropriately initialized whether contextualized or not.
Rename its no_context unused too, and let subsequent patch remove them
(that's not needed for stable backporting, which would involve rejects).

I don't understand why MPOL_LOCAL is described as a pseudo-policy:
it's a reasonable policy which suffers from a confusing implementation
in terms of MPOL_PREFERRED with MPOL_F_LOCAL.  I believe this would be
much more robust if MPOL_LOCAL were recognized in switch statements
throughout, MPOL_F_LOCAL deleted, and MPOL_PREFERRED use the (possibly
empty) nodes mask like everyone else, instead of its preferred_node
variant (I presume an optimization from the days before MPOL_LOCAL).
But that would take me too long to get right and fully tested.
Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>