tree 0ad2112037cc28e3faab41baf2b6ea1851748019
parent f1bcf7e3e734ea8713e08fbc3409f8bf26ec418f
author Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie> 1218708614 +0100
committer Russell King <rmk+kernel@arm.linux.org.uk> 1219864168 +0100

[ARM] Skip memory holes in FLATMEM when reading /proc/pagetypeinfo

Ordinarily, memory holes in flatmem still have a valid memmap and is safe
to use. However, an architecture (ARM) frees up the memmap backing memory
holes on the assumption it is never used. /proc/pagetypeinfo reads the
whole range of pages in a zone believing that the memmap is valid and that
pfn_valid will return false if it is not. On ARM, freeing the memmap breaks
the page->zone linkages even though pfn_valid() returns true and the kernel
can oops shortly afterwards due to accessing a bogus struct zone *.

This patch lets architectures say when FLATMEM can have holes in the
memmap. Rather than an expensive check for valid memory, /proc/pagetypeinfo
will confirm that the page linkages are still valid by checking page->zone
is still the expected zone. The lookup of page_zone is safe as there is a
limited range of memory that is accessed when calling page_zone.  Even if
page_zone happens to return the correct zone, the impact is that the counters
in /proc/pagetypeinfo are slightly off but fragmentation monitoring is
unlikely to be relevant on an embedded system.

Reported-by: H Hartley Sweeten <hsweeten@visionengravers.com>
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
Tested-by: H Hartley Sweeten <hsweeten@visionengravers.com>
Signed-off-by: Russell King <rmk+kernel@arm.linux.org.uk>