Bogus struct page layout on 32-bit

From: Matthew Wilcox
Date: Fri Apr 09 2021 - 22:44:22 EST


On Sat, Apr 10, 2021 at 06:45:35AM +0800, kernel test robot wrote:
> >> include/linux/mm_types.h:274:1: error: static_assert failed due to requirement '__builtin_offsetof(struct page, lru) == __builtin_offsetof(struct folio, lru)' "offsetof(struct page, lru) == offsetof(struct folio, lru)"
> FOLIO_MATCH(lru, lru);
> include/linux/mm_types.h:272:2: note: expanded from macro 'FOLIO_MATCH'
> static_assert(offsetof(struct page, pg) == offsetof(struct folio, fl))

Well, this is interesting. pahole reports:

struct page {
long unsigned int flags; /* 0 4 */
/* XXX 4 bytes hole, try to pack */
union {
struct {
struct list_head lru; /* 8 8 */
...
struct folio {
union {
struct {
long unsigned int flags; /* 0 4 */
struct list_head lru; /* 4 8 */

so this assert has absolutely done its job.

But why has this assert triggered? Why is struct page layout not what
we thought it was? Turns out it's the dma_addr added in 2019 by commit
c25fff7171be ("mm: add dma_addr_t to struct page"). On this particular
config, it's 64-bit, and ppc32 requires alignment to 64-bit. So
the whole union gets moved out by 4 bytes.

Unfortunately, we can't just fix this by putting an 'unsigned long pad'
in front of it. It still aligns the entire union to 8 bytes, and then
it skips another 4 bytes after the pad.

We can fix it like this ...

+++ b/include/linux/mm_types.h
@@ -96,11 +96,12 @@ struct page {
unsigned long private;
};
struct { /* page_pool used by netstack */
+ unsigned long _page_pool_pad;
/**
* @dma_addr: might require a 64-bit value even on
* 32-bit architectures.
*/
- dma_addr_t dma_addr;
+ dma_addr_t dma_addr __packed;
};
struct { /* slab, slob and slub */
union {

but I don't know if GCC is smart enough to realise that dma_addr is now
on an 8 byte boundary and it can use a normal instruction to access it,
or whether it'll do something daft like use byte loads to access it.

We could also do:

+ dma_addr_t dma_addr __packed __aligned(sizeof(void *));

and I see pahole, at least sees this correctly:

struct {
long unsigned int _page_pool_pad; /* 4 4 */
dma_addr_t dma_addr __attribute__((__aligned__(4))); /* 8 8 */
} __attribute__((__packed__)) __attribute__((__aligned__(4)));

This presumably affects any 32-bit architecture with a 64-bit phys_addr_t
/ dma_addr_t. Advice, please?