published August 10, 2026
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
mm/khugepaged: write all dirty file folios when collapsing
[There is no upstream commit, as this code was removed by upstream
commit 044925f9b565 ("mm: fs: remove filemap_nr_thps*() functions and their users")]
As-is, khugepaged and writable-file opening exclude each other. A file
cannot be open writeable and have THPs (because the filesystem is not aware
of them). khugepaged will never collapse file pages for files that are
opened writeable. On an open(O_RDWR/O_WRONLY), the page cache for that
particular file is dropped. This is fine because nothing could've been
dirtied.
However, there is an edge-case: collapse_file() might not be able to
coexist with concurrent writers, but it can coexist with dirty folios
(from previous writers). Therefore, the following can happen:
open(file, O_RDWR)
write(file)
close(file)
madvise(file_mapping, MADV_COLLAPSE, some non-dirty range)
open(file, O_RDWR)
nr_thps > 0
truncate_inode_pages()
/* THPs are cleared out, but so are the dirty folios */
When this edge-case happens, there is data loss, as the dirty folios are
fully discarded.
Fix it by fully writing back the page cache (and waiting) when collapsing
file THPs. Doing so provides the guarantee that no dirty folio will be
observed while there are active THPs. To fully ensure this is safe, the
invalidate_lock needs to be held while doing the writeout, so that
do_dentry_open()'s page cache truncation excludes this write-and-wait.
As a side effect, move the nr_thps counter bumping outside the i_pages
lock. This is correct since the counter itself is an atomic_t and the
producer <-> consumer correctness is provided by a full memory barrier:
smp_mb() in collapse_file()/memory barrier implied by full ordering in
get_write_access() -> atomic_inc_unless_negative().