[PATCH] zone handle unaligned zone boundaries

The buddy allocator has a requirement that boundaries between contigious
zones occur aligned with the the MAX_ORDER ranges.  Where they do not we
will incorrectly merge pages cross zone boundaries.  This can lead to pages
from the wrong zone being handed out.

Originally the buddy allocator would check that buddies were in the same
zone by referencing the zone start and end page frame numbers.  This was
removed as it became very expensive and the buddy allocator already made
the assumption that zones boundaries were aligned.

It is clear that not all configurations and architectures are honouring
this alignment requirement.  Therefore it seems safest to reintroduce
support for non-aligned zone boundaries.  This patch introduces a new check
when considering a page a buddy it compares the zone_table index for the
two pages and refuses to merge the pages where they do not match.  The
zone_table index is unique for each node/zone combination when
FLATMEM/DISCONTIGMEM is enabled and for each section/zone combination when
SPARSEMEM is enabled (a SPARSEMEM section is at least a MAX_ORDER size).

Signed-off-by: Andy Whitcroft <apw@shadowen.org>
Cc: Dave Hansen <haveblue@us.ibm.com>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
Cc: Yasunori Goto <y-goto@jp.fujitsu.com>
Cc: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

1 files changed, 5 insertions, 2 deletions

diff --git a/include/linux/mm.h b/include/linux/mm.h
index e2fa375e478e..697c6bf248c2 100644
--- a/include/linux/mm.h
+++ b/include/linux/mm.h
@@ -465,10 +465,13 @@ static inline unsigned long page_zonenum(struct page *page)
 struct zone;
 extern struct zone *zone_table[];
 
+static inline int page_zone_id(struct page *page)
+{
+	return (page->flags >> ZONETABLE_PGSHIFT) & ZONETABLE_MASK;
+}
 static inline struct zone *page_zone(struct page *page)
 {
-	return zone_table[(page->flags >> ZONETABLE_PGSHIFT) &
-			ZONETABLE_MASK];
+	return zone_table[page_zone_id(page)];
 }
 
 static inline unsigned long page_to_nid(struct page *page)