On Fri, 2 Apr 2010, Rik van Riel wrote:
quoted text
> 
> Interesting that it is a null pointer dereference, given
> that we do not zero out the anon_vma_chain structs before
> freeing them.
> 
> Page_referenced_anon() takes the anon_vma->lock before
> walking the list.  The three places where we modify the
> anon_vma_chain->same_anon_vma list, we also hold the
> lock.

So let's look at the individual anon_vma_chain entries instead.

What is the protection of the 'vma->anon_vma_chain' list? In 
anon_vma_prepare(), the code implies that it is the page_table_lock, but 
what about anon_vma_clone()? If I'm reading it correctly, it is some odd 
mix of "mmap_sem held for writing" or "mmap_sem held for reading _and_ 
page_table_lock". And then we have the exit case that apparently has no 
locking at all, but that should hopefully be single-threaded.

That thing is subtle. A few more comments about the locking would be good, 
so that people like me wouldn't have to try to guess the rules from 
reading the source.

quoted text
> There has to be a reason why a very heavy AIM7 workload
> and some other stress tests did not trigger it, but a few
> people are able to trigger it on their systems...

I don't think AIM7 is at all a very interesting workload, and not likely 
to stress anything at all. Did your AIM7 test actually cause heavy 
swapping? I doubt it. 

Page swapout is where a lot of the magic happens, since that happens 
without mmap_sem held etc. 

			Linus
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