n allows for user pages to be COWed or unmapped at any time, without requiring any notification. But its stable tree does assume that when it finds a KSM page where it placed a KSM page, then it is the same KSM page that it placed there. mremap move could break that assumption: if an area containing a KSM page was unmapped, then an area containing a different KSM page was moved with mremap into the place of the original, before KSM's scan came around to notice. That could then poison a node of the stable tree, so that memcmps would "lie" and upset the ordering of the tree. Probably noone will ever need mremap move on a VM_MERGEABLE area; except that prohibiting it would make trouble for schemes in which we try making everything VM_MERGEABLE e.g. for testing: an mremap which normally works would then fail mysteriously. There's no need to go to any trouble, such as re-sorting KSM's list of rmap_items to match the new layout: simply unmerge the area to COW all its KSM pages before moving, but leave VM_MERGEABLE on so that they're remerged later. Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins Signed-off-by: Chris Wright Signed-off-by: Izik Eidus Cc: Andrea Arcangeli Cc: Rik van Riel Cc: Wu Fengguang Cc: Balbir Singh Cc: Hugh Dickins Cc: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki Cc: Lee Schermerhorn Cc: Avi Kivity Cc: Nick Piggin Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds Ð