A huge page is represented by a compound page, which consists of a
struct page for each PAGE_SIZE page within the huge page. The first
struct page is the "head page", and the remaining are "tail pages".
Defragmentation attempts to lock each page in the range. However,
lock_page() on a tail page actually locks the corresponding head page.
So, if defragmentation tries to lock more than one struct page in a
compound page, it tries to lock the same head page twice and deadlocks
with itself.
Ideally, we should be able to defragment transparent huge pages.
However, THP for filesystems is currently read-only, so a lot of code is
not ready to use huge pages for I/O. For now, let's just return
ETXTBUSY.
This can be reproduced with the following on a kernel with
CONFIG_READ_ONLY_THP_FOR_FS=y:
int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
if (argc != 2) {
fprintf(stderr, "usage: %s PATH\n", argv[0]);
return EXIT_FAILURE;
}
int fd = creat(argv[1], 0777);
if (fd == -1) {
perror("creat");
return EXIT_FAILURE;
}
size_t written = 0;
while (written < FILE_SIZE) {
ssize_t ret = write(fd, zeroes,
sizeof(zeroes) < FILE_SIZE - written ?
sizeof(zeroes) : FILE_SIZE - written);
if (ret < 0) {
perror("write");
return EXIT_FAILURE;
}
written += ret;
}
close(fd);
fd = open(argv[1], O_RDONLY);
if (fd == -1) {
perror("open");
return EXIT_FAILURE;
}
/*
* Reserve some address space so that we can align the file mapping to
* the huge page size.
*/
void *placeholder_map = mmap(NULL, FILE_SIZE * 2, PROT_NONE,
MAP_PRIVATE | MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0);
if (placeholder_map == MAP_FAILED) {
perror("mmap (placeholder)");
return EXIT_FAILURE;
}