Re: [PATCH 07/10] crypto: Use ARCH_DMA_MINALIGN instead of ARCH_KMALLOC_MINALIGN

Catalin Marinas
2022-04-15T12:31:40Z

On Fri, Apr 15, 2022 at 10:51:40AM +0100, Catalin Marinas wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 15, 2022 at 03:51:54PM +0800, Herbert Xu wrote:
> > On Fri, Apr 15, 2022 at 09:49:12AM +0200, Ard Biesheuvel wrote:
> > > I'm not sure I understand what would go wrong if that assumption no
> > > longer holds.
> >
> > It's very simple, we don't do anything to the pointer returned
> > by kmalloc before returning it as a tfm or other object with
> > an alignment of CRYPTO_MINALIGN. IOW if kmalloc starts returning
> > pointers that are not aligned to CRYPTO_MINALIGN then we'd be
> > lying to the compiler.
>
> I agree that it would be lying to the compiler, but I don't think this
> matters for arm64 where the CPU can do unaligned accesses just fine. We
> don't even end up with unaligned accesses here. Let's say we have:
>
> struct x {
> ...
> } __attribute__ ((__aligned__ (128)));
>
> and the kmalloc(sizeof(struct x)) returns a 64-byte aligned pointer.

This needs a clarification. For the above structure, kmalloc() will
return a 128-byte aligned pointer since sizeof(x) is a multiple of 128.
The potential problem is if you have something like:

kmalloc(sizeof(struct x) + 64);

The above could end up as a kmalloc(192) which is available with an
ARCH_KMALLOC_MINALIGN of 64. If that's a real use-case, I can change the
slab patch to not create the 192 (or 48 if we go for an even smaller
ARCH_KMALLOC_MINALIGN) caches and we'd always have ARCH_DMA_MINALIGN
guarantee if the structure itself is correctly aligned. No lying to the
compiler.

--
Catalin