due to a reference count imbalance. In the following case mbind(addr, len) should replace the memory policies of both vma1 and vma2 and thus they will become to share the same mempolicy and the new mempolicy will have the MPOL_F_SHARED flag. +-------------------+-------------------+ | vma1 | vma2(shmem) | +-------------------+-------------------+ | | addr addr+len alloc_pages_vma() uses get_vma_policy() and mpol_cond_put() pair for maintaining the mempolicy reference count. The current rule is that get_vma_policy() only increments refcount for shmem VMA and mpol_conf_put() only decrements refcount if the policy has MPOL_F_SHARED. In above case, vma1 is not shmem vma and vma->policy has MPOL_F_SHARED! The reference count will be decreased even though was not increased whenever alloc_page_vma() is called. This has been broken since commit [52cd3b07: mempolicy: rework mempolicy Reference Counting] in 2008. There is another serious bug with the sharing of memory policies. Currently, mempolicy rebind logic (it is called from cpuset rebinding) ignores a refcount of mempolicy and override it forcibly. Thus, any mempolicy sharing may cause mempolicy corruption. The bug was introduced by commit [68860ec1: cpusets: automatic numa mempolicy rebinding]. Ideally, the shared policy handling would be rewritten to either properly handle COW of the policy structures or at least reference count MPOL_F_SHARED based exclusively on information within the policy. However, this patch takes the easier approach of disabling any policy sharing between VMAs. Each new range allocated with sp_alloc will allocate a new policy, set the reference count to 1 and drop the reference count of the old policy. This increases the memory footprint but is not expected to be a major problem as mbind() is unlikely to be used for fine-grained ranges. It is also inefficient because it means we allocate a new policy even in cases where mbind_range() could use the new_policy passed to it. However, it is more straight-forward and the change should be invisible to the user. [mgorman@suse.de: Edited changelog] Reported-by: Dave Jones , Cc: Christoph Lameter , Reviewed-by: Christoph Lameter Signed-off-by: KOSAKI Motohiro Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman Cc: Josh Boyer Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds `ì5W—