1What is hwpoison? 2 3Upcoming Intel CPUs have support for recovering from some memory errors 4(``MCA recovery''). This requires the OS to declare a page "poisoned", 5kill the processes associated with it and avoid using it in the future. 6 7This patchkit implements the necessary infrastructure in the VM. 8 9To quote the overview comment: 10 11 * High level machine check handler. Handles pages reported by the 12 * hardware as being corrupted usually due to a 2bit ECC memory or cache 13 * failure. 14 * 15 * This focusses on pages detected as corrupted in the background. 16 * When the current CPU tries to consume corruption the currently 17 * running process can just be killed directly instead. This implies 18 * that if the error cannot be handled for some reason it's safe to 19 * just ignore it because no corruption has been consumed yet. Instead 20 * when that happens another machine check will happen. 21 * 22 * Handles page cache pages in various states. The tricky part 23 * here is that we can access any page asynchronous to other VM 24 * users, because memory failures could happen anytime and anywhere, 25 * possibly violating some of their assumptions. This is why this code 26 * has to be extremely careful. Generally it tries to use normal locking 27 * rules, as in get the standard locks, even if that means the 28 * error handling takes potentially a long time. 29 * 30 * Some of the operations here are somewhat inefficient and have non 31 * linear algorithmic complexity, because the data structures have not 32 * been optimized for this case. This is in particular the case 33 * for the mapping from a vma to a process. Since this case is expected 34 * to be rare we hope we can get away with this. 35 36The code consists of a the high level handler in mm/memory-failure.c, 37a new page poison bit and various checks in the VM to handle poisoned 38pages. 39 40The main target right now is KVM guests, but it works for all kinds 41of applications. KVM support requires a recent qemu-kvm release. 42 43For the KVM use there was need for a new signal type so that 44KVM can inject the machine check into the guest with the proper 45address. This in theory allows other applications to handle 46memory failures too. The expection is that near all applications 47won't do that, but some very specialized ones might. 48 49--- 50 51There are two (actually three) modi memory failure recovery can be in: 52 53vm.memory_failure_recovery sysctl set to zero: 54 All memory failures cause a panic. Do not attempt recovery. 55 (on x86 this can be also affected by the tolerant level of the 56 MCE subsystem) 57 58early kill 59 (can be controlled globally and per process) 60 Send SIGBUS to the application as soon as the error is detected 61 This allows applications who can process memory errors in a gentle 62 way (e.g. drop affected object) 63 This is the mode used by KVM qemu. 64 65late kill 66 Send SIGBUS when the application runs into the corrupted page. 67 This is best for memory error unaware applications and default 68 Note some pages are always handled as late kill. 69 70--- 71 72User control: 73 74vm.memory_failure_recovery 75 See sysctl.txt 76 77vm.memory_failure_early_kill 78 Enable early kill mode globally 79 80PR_MCE_KILL 81 Set early/late kill mode/revert to system default 82 arg1: PR_MCE_KILL_CLEAR: Revert to system default 83 arg1: PR_MCE_KILL_SET: arg2 defines thread specific mode 84 PR_MCE_KILL_EARLY: Early kill 85 PR_MCE_KILL_LATE: Late kill 86 PR_MCE_KILL_DEFAULT: Use system global default 87PR_MCE_KILL_GET 88 return current mode 89 90 91--- 92 93Testing: 94 95madvise(MADV_HWPOISON, ....) 96 (as root) 97 Poison a page in the process for testing 98 99 100hwpoison-inject module through debugfs 101 102/sys/debug/hwpoison/ 103 104corrupt-pfn 105 106Inject hwpoison fault at PFN echoed into this file. This does 107some early filtering to avoid corrupted unintended pages in test suites. 108 109unpoison-pfn 110 111Software-unpoison page at PFN echoed into this file. This 112way a page can be reused again. 113This only works for Linux injected failures, not for real 114memory failures. 115 116Note these injection interfaces are not stable and might change between 117kernel versions 118 119corrupt-filter-dev-major 120corrupt-filter-dev-minor 121 122Only handle memory failures to pages associated with the file system defined 123by block device major/minor. -1U is the wildcard value. 124This should be only used for testing with artificial injection. 125 126corrupt-filter-memcg 127 128Limit injection to pages owned by memgroup. Specified by inode number 129of the memcg. 130 131Example: 132 mkdir /sys/fs/cgroup/mem/hwpoison 133 134 usemem -m 100 -s 1000 & 135 echo `jobs -p` > /sys/fs/cgroup/mem/hwpoison/tasks 136 137 memcg_ino=$(ls -id /sys/fs/cgroup/mem/hwpoison | cut -f1 -d' ') 138 echo $memcg_ino > /debug/hwpoison/corrupt-filter-memcg 139 140 page-types -p `pidof init` --hwpoison # shall do nothing 141 page-types -p `pidof usemem` --hwpoison # poison its pages 142 143corrupt-filter-flags-mask 144corrupt-filter-flags-value 145 146When specified, only poison pages if ((page_flags & mask) == value). 147This allows stress testing of many kinds of pages. The page_flags 148are the same as in /proc/kpageflags. The flag bits are defined in 149include/linux/kernel-page-flags.h and documented in 150Documentation/vm/pagemap.txt 151 152Architecture specific MCE injector 153 154x86 has mce-inject, mce-test 155 156Some portable hwpoison test programs in mce-test, see blow. 157 158--- 159 160References: 161 162http://halobates.de/mce-lc09-2.pdf 163 Overview presentation from LinuxCon 09 164 165git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/utils/cpu/mce/mce-test.git 166 Test suite (hwpoison specific portable tests in tsrc) 167 168git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/utils/cpu/mce/mce-inject.git 169 x86 specific injector 170 171 172--- 173 174Limitations: 175 176- Not all page types are supported and never will. Most kernel internal 177objects cannot be recovered, only LRU pages for now. 178- Right now hugepage support is missing. 179 180--- 181Andi Kleen, Oct 2009 182 183