linux.git/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt, branch v4.14

mm, page_alloc: rip out ZONELIST_ORDER_ZONE

2017-09-07T00:27:25+00:00

Patch series "cleanup zonelists initialization", v1.

This is aimed at cleaning up the zonelists initialization code we have
but the primary motivation was bug report [2] which got resolved but the
usage of stop_machine is just too ugly to live.  Most patches are
straightforward but 3 of them need a special consideration.

Patch 1 removes zone ordered zonelists completely.  I am CCing linux-api
because this is a user visible change.  As I argue in the patch
description I do not think we have a strong usecase for it these days.
I have kept sysctl in place and warn into the log if somebody tries to
configure zone lists ordering.  If somebody has a real usecase for it we
can revert this patch but I do not expect anybody will actually notice
runtime differences.  This patch is not strictly needed for the rest but
it made patch 6 easier to implement.

Patch 7 removes stop_machine from build_all_zonelists without adding any
special synchronization between iterators and updater which I _believe_
is acceptable as explained in the changelog.  I hope I am not missing
anything.

Patch 8 then removes zonelists_mutex which is kind of ugly as well and
not really needed AFAICS but a care should be taken when double checking
my thinking.

This patch (of 9):

Supporting zone ordered zonelists costs us just a lot of code while the
usefulness is arguable if existent at all.  Mel has already made node
ordering default on 64b systems.  32b systems are still using
ZONELIST_ORDER_ZONE because it is considered better to fallback to a
different NUMA node rather than consume precious lowmem zones.

This argument is, however, weaken by the fact that the memory reclaim
has been reworked to be node rather than zone oriented.  This means that
lowmem requests have to skip over all highmem pages on LRUs already and
so zone ordering doesn't save the reclaim time much.  So the only
advantage of the zone ordering is under a light memory pressure when
highmem requests do not ever hit into lowmem zones and the lowmem
pressure doesn't need to reclaim.

Considering that 32b NUMA systems are rather suboptimal already and it
is generally advisable to use 64b kernel on such a HW I believe we
should rather care about the code maintainability and just get rid of
ZONELIST_ORDER_ZONE altogether.  Keep systcl in place and warn if
somebody tries to set zone ordering either from kernel command line or
the sysctl.

[mhocko@suse.com: reading vm.numa_zonelist_order will never terminate]
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20170721143915.14161-2-mhocko@kernel.org
Signed-off-by: Michal Hocko 
Acked-by: Mel Gorman 
Acked-by: Vlastimil Babka 
Cc: Johannes Weiner 
Cc: Joonsoo Kim 
Cc: Shaohua Li 
Cc: Toshi Kani 
Cc: Abdul Haleem 
Cc: 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

mm: document highmem_is_dirtyable sysctl

2017-07-10T23:32:32+00:00

It seems that there are still people using 32b kernels which a lot of
memory and the IO tend to suck a lot for them by default.  Mostly
because writers are throttled too when the lowmem is used.  We have
highmem_is_dirtyable to work around that issue but it seems we never
bothered to document it.  Let's do it now, finally.

Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20170626093200.18958-1-mhocko@kernel.org
Signed-off-by: Michal Hocko 
Acked-by: Johannes Weiner 
Cc: Alkis Georgopoulos 
Cc: Mel Gorman 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

mm, madvise: fail with ENOMEM when splitting vma will hit max_map_count

2017-02-25T01:46:55+00:00

If madvise(2) advice will result in the underlying vma being split and
the number of areas mapped by the process will exceed
/proc/sys/vm/max_map_count as a result, return ENOMEM instead of EAGAIN.

EAGAIN is returned by madvise(2) when a kernel resource, such as slab,
is temporarily unavailable.  It indicates that userspace should retry
the advice in the near future.  This is important for advice such as
MADV_DONTNEED which is often used by malloc implementations to free
memory back to the system: we really do want to free memory back when
madvise(2) returns EAGAIN because slab allocations (for vmas, anon_vmas,
or mempolicies) cannot be allocated.

Encountering /proc/sys/vm/max_map_count is not a temporary failure,
however, so return ENOMEM to indicate this is a more serious issue.  A
followup patch to the man page will specify this behavior.

Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/alpine.DEB.2.10.1701241431120.42507@chino.kir.corp.google.com
Signed-off-by: David Rientjes 
Cc: Jonathan Corbet 
Cc: Johannes Weiner 
Cc: Jerome Marchand 
Cc: "Kirill A. Shutemov" 
Cc: Michael Kerrisk 
Cc: Anshuman Khandual 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

Documentation: add watermark_scale_factor to the list of vm systcl file

2016-07-18T14:27:01+00:00

Commit 795ae7a0de6b ("mm: scale kswapd watermarks in proportion to
memory") properly added the description of the new knob to
Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt, but forgot to add it to the list of files
in /proc/sys/vm. Let's fix that.

Signed-off-by: Jerome Marchand 
Acked-by: Johannes Weiner 
Signed-off-by: Jonathan Corbet

mm: /proc/sys/vm/stat_refresh to force vmstat update

2016-05-20T02:12:14+00:00

Provide /proc/sys/vm/stat_refresh to force an immediate update of
per-cpu into global vmstats: useful to avoid a sleep(2) or whatever
before checking counts when testing.  Originally added to work around a
bug which left counts stranded indefinitely on a cpu going idle (an
inaccuracy magnified when small below-batch numbers represent "huge"
amounts of memory), but I believe that bug is now fixed: nonetheless,
this is still a useful knob.

Its schedule_on_each_cpu() is probably too expensive just to fold into
reading /proc/meminfo itself: give this mode 0600 to prevent abuse.
Allow a write or a read to do the same: nothing to read, but "grep -h
Shmem /proc/sys/vm/stat_refresh /proc/meminfo" is convenient.  Oh, and
since global_page_state() itself is careful to disguise any underflow as
0, hack in an "Invalid argument" and pr_warn() if a counter is negative
after the refresh - this helped to fix a misaccounting of
NR_ISOLATED_FILE in my migration code.

But on recent kernels, I find that NR_ALLOC_BATCH and NR_PAGES_SCANNED
often go negative some of the time.  I have not yet worked out why, but
have no evidence that it's actually harmful.  Punt for the moment by
just ignoring the anomaly on those.

Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins 
Cc: "Kirill A. Shutemov" 
Cc: Andrea Arcangeli 
Cc: Andres Lagar-Cavilla 
Cc: Yang Shi 
Cc: Ning Qu 
Cc: Mel Gorman 
Cc: Andres Lagar-Cavilla 
Cc: Konstantin Khlebnikov 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt: update numa_zonelist_order description

2016-04-29T02:34:04+00:00

Commit 3193913ce62c ("mm: page_alloc: default node-ordering on 64-bit
NUMA, zone-ordering on 32-bit") changes the default value of
numa_zonelist_order.  Update the document.

Signed-off-by: Xishi Qiu 
Cc: Mel Gorman 
Cc: Johannes Weiner 
Cc: Rik van Riel 
Cc: David Rientjes 
Cc: Kamezawa Hiroyuki 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

mm: scale kswapd watermarks in proportion to memory

2016-03-17T22:09:34+00:00

In machines with 140G of memory and enterprise flash storage, we have
seen read and write bursts routinely exceed the kswapd watermarks and
cause thundering herds in direct reclaim.  Unfortunately, the only way
to tune kswapd aggressiveness is through adjusting min_free_kbytes - the
system's emergency reserves - which is entirely unrelated to the
system's latency requirements.  In order to get kswapd to maintain a
250M buffer of free memory, the emergency reserves need to be set to 1G.
That is a lot of memory wasted for no good reason.

On the other hand, it's reasonable to assume that allocation bursts and
overall allocation concurrency scale with memory capacity, so it makes
sense to make kswapd aggressiveness a function of that as well.

Change the kswapd watermark scale factor from the currently fixed 25% of
the tunable emergency reserve to a tunable 0.1% of memory.

Beyond 1G of memory, this will produce bigger watermark steps than the
current formula in default settings.  Ensure that the new formula never
chooses steps smaller than that, i.e.  25% of the emergency reserve.

On a 140G machine, this raises the default watermark steps - the
distance between min and low, and low and high - from 16M to 143M.

Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner 
Acked-by: Mel Gorman 
Acked-by: Rik van Riel 
Acked-by: David Rientjes 
Cc: Joonsoo Kim 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

Merge branch 'akpm' (patches from Andrew)

2016-01-15T19:41:44+00:00

Merge first patch-bomb from Andrew Morton:

 - A few hotfixes which missed 4.4 becasue I was asleep.  cc'ed to
   -stable

 - A few misc fixes

 - OCFS2 updates

 - Part of MM.  Including pretty large changes to page-flags handling
   and to thp management which have been buffered up for 2-3 cycles now.

  I have a lot of MM material this time.

[ It turns out the THP part wasn't quite ready, so that got dropped from
  this series  - Linus ]

* emailed patches from Andrew Morton : (117 commits)
  zsmalloc: reorganize struct size_class to pack 4 bytes hole
  mm/zbud.c: use list_last_entry() instead of list_tail_entry()
  zram/zcomp: do not zero out zcomp private pages
  zram: pass gfp from zcomp frontend to backend
  zram: try vmalloc() after kmalloc()
  zram/zcomp: use GFP_NOIO to allocate streams
  mm: add tracepoint for scanning pages
  drivers/base/memory.c: fix kernel warning during memory hotplug on ppc64
  mm/page_isolation: use macro to judge the alignment
  mm: fix noisy sparse warning in LIBCFS_ALLOC_PRE()
  mm: rework virtual memory accounting
  include/linux/memblock.h: fix ordering of 'flags' argument in comments
  mm: move lru_to_page to mm_inline.h
  Documentation/filesystems: describe the shared memory usage/accounting
  memory-hotplug: don't BUG() in register_memory_resource()
  hugetlb: make mm and fs code explicitly non-modular
  mm/swapfile.c: use list_for_each_entry_safe in free_swap_count_continuations
  mm: /proc/pid/clear_refs: no need to clear VM_SOFTDIRTY in clear_soft_dirty_pmd()
  mm: make sure isolate_lru_page() is never called for tail page
  vmstat: make vmstat_updater deferrable again and shut down on idle
  ...

Merge branch 'for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/jikos/trivial

2016-01-15T01:04:19+00:00

Pull trivial tree updates from Jiri Kosina.

* 'for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/jikos/trivial:
  floppy: make local variable non-static
  exynos: fixes an incorrect header guard
  dt-bindings: fixes some incorrect header guards
  cpufreq-dt: correct dead link in documentation
  cpufreq: ARM big LITTLE: correct dead link in documentation
  treewide: Fix typos in printk
  Documentation: filesystem: Fix typo in fs/eventfd.c
  fs/super.c: use && instead of & for warn_on condition
  Documentation: fix sysfs-ptp
  lib: scatterlist: fix Kconfig description

mm: mmap: add new /proc tunable for mmap_base ASLR

2016-01-15T00:00:49+00:00

Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) provides a barrier to
exploitation of user-space processes in the presence of security
vulnerabilities by making it more difficult to find desired code/data
which could help an attack.  This is done by adding a random offset to
the location of regions in the process address space, with a greater
range of potential offset values corresponding to better protection/a
larger search-space for brute force, but also to greater potential for
fragmentation.

The offset added to the mmap_base address, which provides the basis for
the majority of the mappings for a process, is set once on process exec
in arch_pick_mmap_layout() and is done via hard-coded per-arch values,
which reflect, hopefully, the best compromise for all systems.  The
trade-off between increased entropy in the offset value generation and
the corresponding increased variability in address space fragmentation
is not absolute, however, and some platforms may tolerate higher amounts
of entropy.  This patch introduces both new Kconfig values and a sysctl
interface which may be used to change the amount of entropy used for
offset generation on a system.

The direct motivation for this change was in response to the
libstagefright vulnerabilities that affected Android, specifically to
information provided by Google's project zero at:

  http://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2015/09/stagefrightened.html

The attack presented therein, by Google's project zero, specifically
targeted the limited randomness used to generate the offset added to the
mmap_base address in order to craft a brute-force-based attack.
Concretely, the attack was against the mediaserver process, which was
limited to respawning every 5 seconds, on an arm device.  The hard-coded
8 bits used resulted in an average expected success rate of defeating
the mmap ASLR after just over 10 minutes (128 tries at 5 seconds a
piece).  With this patch, and an accompanying increase in the entropy
value to 16 bits, the same attack would take an average expected time of
over 45 hours (32768 tries), which makes it both less feasible and more
likely to be noticed.

The introduced Kconfig and sysctl options are limited by per-arch
minimum and maximum values, the minimum of which was chosen to match the
current hard-coded value and the maximum of which was chosen so as to
give the greatest flexibility without generating an invalid mmap_base
address, generally a 3-4 bits less than the number of bits in the
user-space accessible virtual address space.

When decided whether or not to change the default value, a system
developer should consider that mmap_base address could be placed
anywhere up to 2^(value) bits away from the non-randomized location,
which would introduce variable-sized areas above and below the mmap_base
address such that the maximum vm_area_struct size may be reduced,
preventing very large allocations.

This patch (of 4):

ASLR only uses as few as 8 bits to generate the random offset for the
mmap base address on 32 bit architectures.  This value was chosen to
prevent a poorly chosen value from dividing the address space in such a
way as to prevent large allocations.  This may not be an issue on all
platforms.  Allow the specification of a minimum number of bits so that
platforms desiring greater ASLR protection may determine where to place
the trade-off.

Signed-off-by: Daniel Cashman 
Cc: Russell King 
Acked-by: Kees Cook 
Cc: Ingo Molnar 
Cc: Jonathan Corbet 
Cc: Don Zickus 
Cc: Eric W. Biederman 
Cc: Heinrich Schuchardt 
Cc: Josh Poimboeuf 
Cc: Kirill A. Shutemov 
Cc: Naoya Horiguchi 
Cc: Andrea Arcangeli 
Cc: Mel Gorman 
Cc: Thomas Gleixner 
Cc: David Rientjes 
Cc: Mark Salyzyn 
Cc: Jeff Vander Stoep 
Cc: Nick Kralevich 
Cc: Catalin Marinas 
Cc: Will Deacon 
Cc: "H. Peter Anvin" 
Cc: Hector Marco-Gisbert 
Cc: Borislav Petkov 
Cc: Ralf Baechle 
Cc: Heiko Carstens 
Cc: Martin Schwidefsky 
Cc: Benjamin Herrenschmidt 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds