Re: [PATCH] sh: remove unneeded constructor.

[Matthew Wilcox <willy@infradead.org>]

On Wed, Aug 01, 2018 at 07:02:05PM -0400, Rich Felker wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 01, 2018 at 04:20:19AM -0700, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> > __GFP_ZERO overrode the constructor.  That is, before 128227e7fe40,
> > if you specified both a constructor and __GFP_ZERO, first the slab
> > code would invoke the constructor, then it would zero the allocation.
> > So this patch is preserving the existing behaviour.  Whether the existing
> > behaviour is correct or not, I cannot say.
> 
> Then I think we should really try to figure out whether this is a
> buried bug before deleting the evidence of it...

Archaeology suggests the bug was introduced in commit 2a5eacca85d3 ("sh:
Move page table allocation out of line") in 2009.  Previous code:

-       pgd = kzalloc(sizeof(*pgd) * PTRS_PER_PGD, GFP_KERNEL | __GFP_REPEAT);
-
-       for (i = USER_PTRS_PER_PGD; i < PTRS_PER_PGD; i++)
-               pgd[i] = swapper_pg_dir[i];

Replacement code:

+#define PGALLOC_GFP GFP_KERNEL | __GFP_REPEAT | __GFP_ZERO

+void pgd_ctor(void *x)
+{
+       pgd_t *pgd = x;
+
+       memcpy(pgd + USER_PTRS_PER_PGD,
+              swapper_pg_dir + USER_PTRS_PER_PGD,
+              (PTRS_PER_PGD - USER_PTRS_PER_PGD) * sizeof(pgd_t));
+}

+       pgd_cachep = kmem_cache_create("pgd_cache",
+                                      PTRS_PER_PGD * (1<<PTE_MAGNITUDE),
+                                      PAGE_SIZE, SLAB_PANIC, pgd_ctor);

+pgd_t *pgd_alloc(struct mm_struct *mm)
+{
+       return kmem_cache_alloc(pgd_cachep, PGALLOC_GFP);

It clearly doesn't cause any bugs to zero the PGD entries (... or somebody
would have noticed since 2009?), but I suspect it causes various PMD
entries to not be shared.

I'm really happy we decided to introduce this check.  It caught a really
old and completely unrelated bug!