Will Deacon reports:- When taking a longterm GUP pin via pin_user_pages(), __gup_longterm_locked() tries to migrate target folios that should not be longterm pinned, for example because they reside in a CMA region or movable zone. This is done by first pinning all of the target folios anyway, collecting all of the longterm-unpinnable target folios into a list, dropping the pins that were just taken and finally handing the list off to migrate_pages() for the actual migration. It is critically important that no unexpected references are held on the folios being migrated, otherwise the migration will fail and pin_user_pages() will return -ENOMEM to its caller. Unfortunately, it is relatively easy to observe migration failures when running pKVM (which uses pin_user_pages() on crosvm's virtual address space to resolve stage-2 page faults from the guest) on a 6.15-based Pixel 6 device and this results in the VM terminating prematurely. In the failure case, 'crosvm' has called mlock(MLOCK_ONFAULT) on its mapping of guest memory prior to the pinning. Subsequently, when pin_user_pages() walks the page-table, the relevant 'pte' is not present and so the faulting logic allocates a new folio, mlocks it with mlock_folio() and maps it in the page-table. Since commit 2fbb0c10d1e8 ("mm/munlock: mlock_page() munlock_page() batch by pagevec"), mlock/munlock operations on a folio (formerly page), are deferred. For example, mlock_folio() takes an additional reference on the target folio before placing it into a per-cpu 'folio_batch' for later processing by mlock_folio_batch(), which drops the refcount once the operation is complete. Processing of the batches is coupled with the LRU batch logic and can be forcefully drained with lru_add_drain_all() but as long as a folio remains unprocessed on the batch, its refcount will be elevated. This deferred batching therefore interacts poorly with the pKVM pinning scenario as we can find ourselves in a situation where the migration code fails to migrate a folio due to the elevated refcount from the pending mlock operation. Hugh Dickins adds:- !folio_test_lru() has never been a very reliable way to tell if an lru_add_drain_all() is worth calling, to remove LRU cache references to make the folio migratable: the LRU flag may be set even while the folio is held with an extra reference in a per-CPU LRU cache. 5.18 commit 2fbb0c10d1e8 may have made it more unreliable. Then 6.11 commit 33dfe9204f29 ("mm/gup: clear the LRU flag of a page before adding to LRU batch") tried to make it reliable, by moving LRU flag clearing; but missed the mlock/munlock batches, so still unreliable as reported. And it turns out to be difficult to extend 33dfe9204f29's LRU flag clearing to the mlock/munlock batches: if they do benefit from batching, mlock/munlock cannot be so effective when easily suppressed while !LRU. Instead, switch to an expected ref_count check, which was more reliable all along: some more false positives (unhelpful drains) than before, and never a guarantee that the folio will prove migratable, but better. Note on PG_private_2: ceph and nfs are still using the deprecated PG_private_2 flag, with the aid of netfs and filemap support functions. Although it is consistently matched by an increment of folio ref_count, folio_expected_ref_count() intentionally does not recognize it, and ceph folio migration currently depends on that for PG_private_2 folios to be rejected. New references to the deprecated flag are discouraged, so do not add it into the collect_longterm_unpinnable_folios() calculation: but longterm pinning of transiently PG_private_2 ceph and nfs folios (an uncommon case) may invoke a redundant lru_add_drain_all(). And this makes easy the backport to earlier releases: up to and including 6.12, btrfs also used PG_private_2, but without a ref_count increment. Note for stable backports: requires 6.16 commit 86ebd50224c0 ("mm: add folio_expected_ref_count() for reference count calculation"). Reported-by: Will Deacon Closes: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/20250815101858.24352-1-will@kernel.org/ Fixes: 9a4e9f3b2d73 ("mm: update get_user_pages_longterm to migrate pages allocated from CMA region") Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins Cc: --- mm/gup.c | 3 ++- 1 file changed, 2 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/mm/gup.c b/mm/gup.c index adffe663594d..82aec6443c0a 100644 --- a/mm/gup.c +++ b/mm/gup.c @@ -2307,7 +2307,8 @@ static unsigned long collect_longterm_unpinnable_folios( continue; } - if (!folio_test_lru(folio) && drain_allow) { + if (drain_allow && folio_ref_count(folio) != + folio_expected_ref_count(folio) + 1) { lru_add_drain_all(); drain_allow = false; } -- 2.51.0