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

Arnd Bergmann
2022-04-20T11:29:33Z

On Tue, Apr 19, 2022 at 11:50 PM Ard Biesheuvel <ardb@kernel.org> wrote:
> On Mon, 18 Apr 2022 at 18:44, Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas@arm.com> wrote:
> > On Mon, Apr 18, 2022 at 04:37:17PM +0800, Herbert Xu wrote:

> > BTW before you have a go at this, there's also Linus' idea that does not
> > change the crypto code (at least not functionally). Of course, you and
> > Ard can still try to figure out how to reduce the padding but if we go
> > with Linus' idea of a new GFP_NODMA flag, there won't be any changes to
> > the crypto code as long as it doesn't pass such flag. So, the options:
> >
> > 1. Change ARCH_KMALLOC_MINALIGN to 8 (or ARCH_SLAB_MINALIGN if higher)
> > while keeping ARCH_DMA_MINALIGN to 128. By default kmalloc() will
> > honour the 128-byte alignment, unless GDP_NODMA is passed. This still
> > requires changing CRYPTO_MINALIGN to ARCH_DMA_MINALIGN but there is
> > no functional change, kmalloc() without the new flag will return
> > CRYPTO_MINALIGN-aligned pointers.
> >
> > 2. Leave ARCH_KMALLOC_MINALIGN as ARCH_DMA_MINALIGN (128) and introduce
> > a new GFP_PACKED (I think it fits better than 'NODMA') flag that
> > reduces the minimum kmalloc() below ARCH_KMALLOC_MINALIGN (and
> > probably at least ARCH_SLAB_MINALIGN). It's equivalent to (1) but
> > does not touch the crypto code at all.
> >
> > (1) and (2) are the same, just minor naming difference. Happy to go with
> > any of them. They still have the downside that we need to add the new
> > GFP_ flag to those hotspots that allocate small objects (Arnd provided
> > an idea on how to find them with ftrace) but at least we know it won't
> > inadvertently break anything.

Right, both of these seem reasonable to me.

> I'm not sure GFP_NODMA adds much here.
>
> The way I see it, the issue in the crypto code is that we are relying
> on a ARCH_KMALLOC_ALIGN aligned zero length __ctx[] array for three
> different things:
...

Right. So as long as the crypto subsystem has additional alignment
requirement, it won't benefit from GFP_NODMA. For everything else,
GFP_NODMA would however have a very direct and measuable
impact on memory consumption.

Your proposed changes to the crypto subsystem all seem helpful
as well, just mostly orthogonal to the savings elsewhere. I don't know
how much memory is permanently tied up in overaligned crypto
data structures, but my guess is that it's not a lot on most systems.

Improving the alignment for crypto would however likely help
with stack usage on on-stack structures, and with performance
when the amount of ctx memory to clear for each operation
becomes smaller.

Arnd