Re: [patch] slab: always follow arch requested alignments

[Heiko Carstens <heiko.carstens@de.ibm.com>]

On Sat, Jul 22, 2006 at 12:42:32PM -0700, Christoph Lameter wrote:
> On Sat, 22 Jul 2006, Heiko Carstens wrote:
> > Since that didn't work I thought why not set ARCH_SLAB_MINALIGN to 8, since
> > that would (according to the description) guarantee that _all_ caches would
> > have an 8 byte alignment. But that didn't work too.
> 
> Why did that not work
> 
> See kmem_cache_create():
>       /* 2) arch mandated alignment: disables debug if necessary */
>         if (ralign < ARCH_SLAB_MINALIGN) {
>                 ralign = ARCH_SLAB_MINALIGN;
>                 if (ralign > BYTES_PER_WORD)
>                         flags &= ~(SLAB_RED_ZONE | SLAB_STORE_USER);
>         }

That is because if kmem_cache_create gets called with SLAB_HWCACHE_ALIGN set
in flags then ralign will be greater or equal to ARCH_SLAB_MINALIGN:

        /* 1) arch recommendation: can be overridden for debug */ 
        if (flags & SLAB_HWCACHE_ALIGN) { 
	        [...]
                ralign = cache_line_size(); 
	        [...]

Therefore the test above will be passed and SLAB_RED_ZONE and SLAB_STORE_USER
will stay in flags.
cache_line_size() will return 256 on s390.