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I haven't reproduced it myself but the fail scenario is that on such
machines (notably ARM and some embedded powerpc), if you manage to hit
that futex path on a writable page whose dirty bit has gone from the PTE,
you'll livelock inside the kernel from what I can tell.

It will go in a loop of trying the atomic access, failing, trying gup to
"fix it up", getting succcess from gup, go back to the atomic access,
failing again because dirty wasn't fixed etc...

So I think you essentially hang in the kernel.

The scenario is probably rare'ish because affected architecture are
embedded and tend to not swap much (if at all) so we probably rarely hit
the case where dirty is missing or young is missing, but I think Shan has
a piece of SW that can reliably reproduce it using a shared writable
mapping & fork or something like that.

On archs who use SW tracking of dirty & young, a page without dirty is
effectively mapped read-only and a page with...