The core page allocator ensures that page flags are zeroed when freeing
pages via free_pages_check. A number of architectures (ARM, PPC, MIPS)
rely on this property to treat new pages as dirty with respect to the data
cache and perform the appropriate flushing before mapping the pages into
userspace.
This can lead to cache synchronisation problems when using hugepages,
since the allocator keeps its own pool of pages above the usual page
allocator and does not reset the page flags when freeing a page into the
pool.
This patch adds a new architecture hook, arch_clear_hugepage_flags, so
that architectures which rely on the page flags being in a particular
state for fresh allocations can adjust the flags accordingly when a page
is freed into the pool.
Signed-off-by: Will Deacon <will.deacon@arm.com> Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.cz> Reviewed-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.cz> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>