Race in shrink_cache

Daniel Phillips (phillips@arcor.de)
Thu, 5 Sep 2002 07:04:28 +0200


Hi Marcelo,

This looks really suspicious, vmscan.c#435:

spin_unlock(&pagemap_lru_lock);
if (put_page_testzero(page))
__free_pages_ok(page, 0);
/* avoid to free a locked page */
page_cache_get(page);

/* whoops, double free coming */

I suggest you bump the page count before releasing the lru lock. The race
shown above may not in fact be possible, but the current code is fragile.

-- 
Daniel
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