Re: [Xen-devel] Balloon driver bug in increase_reservation

[Ian Campbell <Ian.Campbell@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 2013-09-02 at 15:43 +0100, Wei Liu wrote:
> Hi, Stefano
> 
> I found another bug in the balloon scratch page code. As I didn't follow
> the discussion on scratch page so I cannot propose a proper fix at the
> moment.
> 
> The problem is that in balloon.c:increase_reservation, when a ballooned
> page is resued, it can have a valid P2M entry pointing to the scratch,
> hitting the BUG_ON
> 
>    BUG_ON(!xen_feature(XENFEAT_auto_translated_physmap) &&
>           phys_to_machine_mapping_valid(pfn));
> 
> As balloon worker might run by a CPU other then the one that returns the
> page, checking pfn_to_mfn(pfn) == local_cpu_scratch_page_mfn wouldn't
> work.  Checking pfn_to_mfn(pfn) belongs to the set of all scratch page
> mfns is not desirable.

This makes me think that whoever suggested that pfn_to_mfn for a
ballooned page out to return INVALID_MFN was right.

Even though we happen to have put a mapping there there pages are
"logically empty" and that's really what callers such as
phys_to_machine_mapping_valid care about, not whether the processor
thinks there is a mapping or not.

> 
> My thoughts so far:
>  1. remove that BUG_ON (looks like a wrong fix though)
>  2. make balloon scratch page global
> 
> Other thoughts?
> 
> Wei.
> 
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