This implied a reference counting bug and the problem happened during
mbind().
mbind() applies a new memory policy to a range and uses mbind_range() to
merge existing VMAs or split them as necessary. In the event of splits,
mpol_dup() will allocate a new struct mempolicy and maintain existing
reference counts whose rules are documented in
Documentation/vm/numa_memory_policy.txt .
The problem occurs with shared memory policies. The vm_op->set_policy
increments the reference count if necessary and split_vma() and
vma_merge() have already handled the existing reference counts.
However, policy_vma() screws it up by replacing an existing
vma->vm_policy with one that potentially has the wrong reference count
leading to a premature free. This patch removes the damage caused by
policy_vma().
With this patch applied Dave's trinity tool runs an mbind test for 5
minutes without error. /proc/slabinfo reported that there are no
numa_policy or shared_policy_node objects allocated after the test
completed and the shared memory region was deleted.
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de> Cc: Dave Jones <davej@redhat.com> Cc: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com> Cc: Stephen Wilson <wilsons@start.ca> Cc: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux.com> Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Cc: <stable@vger.kernel.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>