KSM's scan allows for user pages to be COWed or unmapped at any time,
without requiring any notification. But its stable tree does assume that
when it finds a KSM page where it placed a KSM page, then it is the same
KSM page that it placed there.
mremap move could break that assumption: if an area containing a KSM page
was unmapped, then an area containing a different KSM page was moved with
mremap into the place of the original, before KSM's scan came around to
notice. That could then poison a node of the stable tree, so that memcmps
would "lie" and upset the ordering of the tree.
Probably noone will ever need mremap move on a VM_MERGEABLE area; except
that prohibiting it would make trouble for schemes in which we try making
everything VM_MERGEABLE e.g. for testing: an mremap which normally works
would then fail mysteriously.
There's no need to go to any trouble, such as re-sorting KSM's list of
rmap_items to match the new layout: simply unmerge the area to COW all its
KSM pages before moving, but leave VM_MERGEABLE on so that they're
remerged later.
Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hugh.dickins@tiscali.co.uk>
Signed-off-by: Chris Wright <chrisw@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Izik Eidus <ieidus@redhat.com>
Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com>
Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Cc: Balbir Singh <balbir@in.ibm.com>
Cc: Hugh Dickins <hugh.dickins@tiscali.co.uk>
Cc: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com>
Cc: Lee Schermerhorn <lee.schermerhorn@hp.com>
Cc: Avi Kivity <avi@redhat.com>
Cc: Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>