Commit 8456a648cf44 ("slab: use struct page for slab management") causes
a crash in the LVM2 testsuite on PA-RISC (the crashing test is
fsadm.sh). The testsuite doesn't crash on 3.12, crashes on 3.13-rc1 and
later.
Kernel panic - not syncing: Bad Address (null pointer deref?)
Commit 8456a648cf44 changes the page structure so that the slab
subsystem reuses the page->mapping field.
The crash happens in the following way:
* XFS allocates some memory from slab and issues a bio to read data
into it.
* the bio is sent to the loopback device.
* lo_receive creates an actor and calls splice_direct_to_actor.
* lo_splice_actor copies data to the target page.
* lo_splice_actor calls flush_dcache_page because the page may be
mapped by userspace. In that case we need to flush the kernel cache.
* flush_dcache_page asks for the list of userspace mappings, however
that page->mapping field is reused by the slab subsystem for a
different purpose. This causes the crash.
Note that other architectures without coherent caches (sparc, arm, mips)
also call page_mapping from flush_dcache_page, so they may crash in the
same way.
This patch fixes this bug by testing if the page is a slab page in
page_mapping and returning NULL if it is.
The patch also fixes VM_BUG_ON(PageSlab(page)) that could happen in
earlier kernels in the same scenario on architectures without cache
coherence when CONFIG_DEBUG_VM is enabled - so it should be backported
to stable kernels.
In the old kernels, the function page_mapping is placed in
include/linux/mm.h, so you should modify the patch accordingly when
backporting it.
Signed-off-by: Mikulas Patocka <mpatocka@redhat.com> Cc: John David Anglin <dave.anglin@bell.net>] Cc: Andi Kleen <ak@linux.intel.com> Cc: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux.com> Acked-by: Pekka Enberg <penberg@kernel.org> Reviewed-by: Joonsoo Kim <iamjoonsoo.kim@lge.com> Cc: Helge Deller <deller@gmx.de> Cc: <stable@vger.kernel.org> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>