Ignore madvise(MADV_WILLNEED) for hugetlbfs-backed regions

madvise(MADV_WILLNEED) forces page cache readahead on a range of memory
backed by a file.  The assumption is made that the page required is
order-0 and "normal" page cache.

On hugetlbfs, this assumption is not true and order-0 pages are
allocated and inserted into the hugetlbfs page cache.  This leaks
hugetlbfs page reservations and can cause BUGs to trigger related to
corrupted page tables.

This patch causes MADV_WILLNEED to be ignored for hugetlbfs-backed
regions.

Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
Cc: stable@kernel.org
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 8 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/mm/madvise.c b/mm/madvise.c
index b9ce574..36d6ea2 100644
--- a/mm/madvise.c
+++ b/mm/madvise.c
@@ -112,6 +112,14 @@ static long madvise_willneed(struct vm_area_struct * vma,
 	if (!file)
 		return -EBADF;
 
+	/*
+	 * Page cache readahead assumes page cache pages are order-0 which
+	 * is not the case for hugetlbfs. Do not give a bad return value
+	 * but ignore the advice.
+	 */
+	if (vma->vm_flags & VM_HUGETLB)
+		return 0;
+
 	if (file->f_mapping->a_ops->get_xip_mem) {
 		/* no bad return value, but ignore advice */
 		return 0;