The tmpfs remount logic preserves filesystem mempolicy if the mpol=M
option is not specified in the remount request. A new policy can be
specified if mpol=M is given.
Before this patch remounting an mpol bound tmpfs without specifying
mpol= mount option in the remount request would set the filesystem's
mempolicy object to a freed mempolicy object.
To reproduce the problem boot a DEBUG_PAGEALLOC kernel and run:
# mkdir /tmp/x
# mount -t tmpfs -o size=100M,mpol=interleave nodev /tmp/x
Non-debug kernels will not crash immediately because referencing the
dangling mpol will not cause a fault. Instead the filesystem will
reference a freed mempolicy object, which will cause unpredictable
behavior.
The problem boils down to a dropped mpol reference below if
shmem_parse_options() does not allocate a new mpol: