if (first) __page_set_anon_rmap(page, vma, address); and notice what anon_vma it will use? It will use the anon_vma for process B! What happens then? Trivial: process 'A' also pages it in (nothing happens, it's not the first mapping), and then process 'B' execve's or exits or unmaps, making anon_vma B go away. End result: process A has a page that points to anon_vma B, but anon_vma B does not exist any more. This can go on forever. Forget about RCU grace periods, forget about locking, forget anything like that. The bug is simply that page->mapping points to an anon_vma that was correct at one point, but was _not_ the one that was shared by all users of that possible mapping. Changing it to always use the deepest anon_vma in the anonvma chain gets us to the safest model. This can be improved in certain cases: if we know the page is private to just this particular mapping (for example, it's a new page, or it is the only swapcache entry), we could pick the top (most specific) anon_vma. But that's a future optimization. Make it _work_ reliably first. Reviewed-by: Rik van Riel Acked-by: Johannes Weiner Tested-by: Borislav Petkov [ "What do you know, I think you fixed it!" ] Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds