What is hwpoison?

Upcoming Intel CPUs have support for recovering from some memory errors
(``MCA recovery''). This requires the OS to declare a page "poisoned",
kill the processes associated with it and avoid using it in the future.

This patchkit implements the necessary infrastructure in the VM.

To quote the overview comment:

 * High level machine check handler. Handles pages reported by the
 * hardware as being corrupted usually due to a 2bit ECC memory or cache
 * failure.
 *
 * This focusses on pages detected as corrupted in the background.
 * When the current CPU tries to consume corruption the currently
 * running process can just be killed directly instead. This implies
 * that if the error cannot be handled for some reason it's safe to
 * just ignore it because no corruption has been consumed yet. Instead
 * when that happens another machine check will happen.
 *
 * Handles page cache pages in various states. The tricky part
 * here is that we can access any page asynchronous to other VM
 * users, because memory failures could happen anytime and anywhere,
 * possibly violating some of their assumptions. This is why this code
 * has to be extremely careful. Generally it tries to use normal locking
 * rules, as in get the standard locks, even if that means the
 * error handling takes potentially a long time.
 *
 * Some of the operations here are somewhat inefficient and have non
 * linear algorithmic complexity, because the data structures have not
 * been optimized for this case. This is in particular the case
 * for the mapping from a vma to a process. Since this case is expected
 * to be rare we hope we can get away with this.

The code consists of a the high level handler in mm/memory-failure.c,
a new page poison bit and various checks in the VM to handle poisoned
pages.

The main target right now is KVM guests, but it works for all kinds
of applications. KVM support requires a recent qemu-kvm release.

For the KVM use there was need for a new signal type so that
KVM can inject the machine check into the guest with the proper
address. This in theory allows other applications to handle
memory failures too. The expection is that near all applications
won't do that, but some very specialized ones might.

---

There are two (actually three) modi memory failure recovery can be in:

vm.memory_failure_recovery sysctl set to zero:
	All memory failures cause a panic. Do not attempt recovery.
	(on x86 this can be also affected by the tolerant level of the
	MCE subsystem)

early kill
	(can be controlled globally and per process)
	Send SIGBUS to the application as soon as the error is detected
	This allows applications who can process memory errors in a gentle
	way (e.g. drop affected object)
	This is the mode used by KVM qemu.

late kill
	Send SIGBUS when the application runs into the corrupted page.
	This is best for memory error unaware applications and default
	Note some pages are always handled as late kill.

---

User control:

vm.memory_failure_recovery
	See sysctl.txt

vm.memory_failure_early_kill
	Enable early kill mode globally

PR_MCE_KILL
	Set early/late kill mode/revert to system default
	arg1: PR_MCE_KILL_CLEAR: Revert to system default
	arg1: PR_MCE_KILL_SET: arg2 defines thread specific mode
		PR_MCE_KILL_EARLY: Early kill
		PR_MCE_KILL_LATE:  Late kill
		PR_MCE_KILL_DEFAULT: Use system global default
PR_MCE_KILL_GET
	return current mode


---

Testing:

madvise(MADV_POISON, ....)
	(as root)
	Poison a page in the process for testing


hwpoison-inject module through debugfs
	/sys/debug/hwpoison/corrupt-pfn

Inject hwpoison fault at PFN echoed into this file


Architecture specific MCE injector

x86 has mce-inject, mce-test

Some portable hwpoison test programs in mce-test, see blow.

---

References:

http://halobates.de/mce-lc09-2.pdf
	Overview presentation from LinuxCon 09

git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/utils/cpu/mce/mce-test.git
	Test suite (hwpoison specific portable tests in tsrc)

git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/utils/cpu/mce/mce-inject.git
	x86 specific injector


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Limitations:

- Not all page types are supported and never will. Most kernel internal
objects cannot be recovered, only LRU pages for now.
- Right now hugepage support is missing.

---
Andi Kleen, Oct 2009