Re: upcoming kerneloops.org item: get_page_from_freelist

[Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>]

On Fri, Jun 26, 2009 at 08:16:18AM +0300, Pekka Enberg wrote:
> Hi Ted,
> 
> On Thu, Jun 25, 2009 at 05:11:25PM -0500, Eric Sandeen wrote:
> > > ecryptfs used to do kmalloc(PAGE_CACHE_SIZE) & virt_to_page on that, and
> > > with SLUB + slub debug, that gave back non-aligned memory, causing
> > > eventual corruption ...
> 
> On Thu, 25 Jun 2009, Theodore Tso wrote:
> > Grumble.  Any chance we could add an kmem_cache option which requires
> > the memory to be aligned?  Otherwise we could rewrite our own sub-page
> > allocator in ext4 that only handled aligned filesystem block sizes
> > (i.e., 1k, 2k, 4k, etc.) but that would be really silly and be extra
> > code that really should be done once at core functionality.
> 
> We alredy have SLAB_HW_ALIGN but I wonder if this is a plain old bug in 
> SLUB. Christoph, Nick, don't we need something like this in the allocator? 
> Eric, does this fix your case?

Well I don't understand Ted's complaint. kmem_cache_create takes an
alignment argument.