Re: [patch 2/2] slab: always consider arch mandated alignment

From: Heiko Carstens
Date: Wed Jul 26 2006 - 07:21:06 EST


On Wed, Jul 26, 2006 at 01:37:42PM +0300, Pekka J Enberg wrote:
> On Wed, 26 Jul 2006, Heiko Carstens wrote:
> > It's enough to fix the ARCH_SLAB_MINALIGN problem. But it does _not_ fix the
> > ARCH_KMALLOC_MINALIGN problem. s390 currently only uses ARCH_KMALLOC_MINALIGN
> > since that should be good enough and it doesn't disable as much debugging
> > as ARCH_SLAB_MINALIGN does.
> > What exactly isn't clear from the description of the first patch? Or why do
> > you consider it bogus?
>
> Now I am confused. What do you mean by "doesn't disable as much debugging
> as ARCH_SLAB_MINALIGN does"? AFAICT, the SLAB_RED_ZONE and SLAB_STORE_USER
> options _require_ BYTES_PER_WORD alignment, so if s390 requires 8
> byte alignment, you can't have them debugging anyhow...

We only specify ARCH_KMALLOC_MINALIGN, since that aligns only the kmalloc
caches, but it doesn't disable debugging on other caches that are created
via kmem_cache_create() where an alignment of e.g. 0 is specified.

The point of the first patch is: why should the slab cache be allowed to chose
an aligment that is less than what the caller specified? This does very likely
break things.
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