Re: [PATCH] mm: check for sleepable context in kvfree

From: Jeff Layton
Date: Tue Jul 23 2019 - 13:52:41 EST


On Tue, 2019-07-23 at 09:12 -0400, Jeff Layton wrote:
> A lot of callers of kvfree only go down the vfree path under very rare
> circumstances, and so may never end up hitting the might_sleep_if in it.
> Ensure that when kvfree is called, that it is operating in a context
> where it is allowed to sleep.
>
> Cc: Alexander Viro <viro@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Cc: Luis Henriques <lhenriques@xxxxxxxx>
> Signed-off-by: Jeff Layton <jlayton@xxxxxxxxxx>
> ---
> mm/util.c | 2 ++
> 1 file changed, 2 insertions(+)
>

FWIW, I started looking at this after Luis sent me some ceph patches
that fixed a few of these problems. I have not done extensive testing
with this patch, so maybe consider this an RFC for now.

HCH points out that xfs uses kvfree as a generic "free this no matter
what it is" sort of wrapper and expects the callers to work out whether
they might be freeing a vmalloc'ed address. If that sort of usage turns
out to be prevalent, then we may need another approach to clean this up.

> diff --git a/mm/util.c b/mm/util.c
> index e6351a80f248..81ec2a003c86 100644
> --- a/mm/util.c
> +++ b/mm/util.c
> @@ -482,6 +482,8 @@ EXPORT_SYMBOL(kvmalloc_node);
> */
> void kvfree(const void *addr)
> {
> + might_sleep_if(!in_interrupt());
> +
> if (is_vmalloc_addr(addr))
> vfree(addr);
> else

--
Jeff Layton <jlayton@xxxxxxxxxx>