Bug 6490 - Overflow on 32bit archs in page_alloc.c, setup_per_zone_pages_min
Summary: Overflow on 32bit archs in page_alloc.c, setup_per_zone_pages_min
Status: CLOSED CODE_FIX
Alias: None
Product: Memory Management
Classification: Unclassified
Component: Page Allocator (show other bugs)
Hardware: i386 Linux
: P2 normal
Assignee: Paolo 'Blaisorblade' Giarrusso
URL:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2006-05-04 05:39 UTC by ake.sandgren
Modified: 2007-02-21 09:24 UTC (History)
1 user (show)

See Also:
Kernel Version: 2.6.15
Subsystem:
Regression: ---
Bisected commit-id:


Attachments

Description ake.sandgren 2006-05-04 05:39:39 UTC
Most recent kernel where this bug did not occur:
Distribution: 
Hardware Environment: Systems with 896MB of memory or more
Software Environment:
Problem Description:

There is a unsigned long overflow in page_alloc.c in setup_per_zone_pages_min.
unsigned long tmp;
spin_lock_irqsave(&zone->lru_lock, flags);
tmp = (pages_min * zone->present_pages) / lowmem_pages;

If min_free_kbytes is changed to a value slightly larger then 76260
the tmp = (... calculation will overflow on a 32bit arch resulting in setting
pages_min for the normal zone to a bad value.

There is no check in min_free_kbytes_sysctl_handler to cap min_free_kbytes to
prevent this from happening.

something like
tmp = (pages_min * (zone->present_pages >> 3))/(lowmem_pages >> 3)
will give the same result +- 1 page without overflowing for larger min_free_kbytes.


Steps to reproduce:
Look at /proc/zoneinfo
increase min_free_kbytes to 131072
Look at /proc/zoneinfo
Comment 1 Martin J. Bligh 2006-05-04 09:56:49 UTC
I think it's actually worse than this.

Surely zone->present_pages could be 2^24 on a 64GB system (OK, 63 highmem, but
who's counting), which means that min_free_kbytes is limited to about 1024K to
make it still work?

I'd be tempted to just do 

tmp = pages_min * (zone->present_pages / lowmem_pages), which will lose us 
a little granularity, but do we really care?

Worst case we could do something like:

tmp = (pages_min * ((zone->present_pages << 4) / lowmem_pages)) >> 4

What's the worst case for min_free_kbytes?
Comment 2 Paolo 'Blaisorblade' Giarrusso 2007-02-21 09:22:47 UTC
This should have been fixed by commit ac924c6034d9095f95ee889f7e31bbb9145da0c2 
in kernel 2.6.17, this bug should then be closed.

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