Re: amusing SLUB compaction bug when CC_OPTIMIZE_FOR_SIZE

Hugh Dickins
2022-09-29T21:55:03Z

On Thu, 29 Sep 2022, Vlastimil Babka wrote:
> On 9/28/22 19:50, Hugh Dickins wrote:
> > On Wed, 28 Sep 2022, Vlastimil Babka wrote:
> >> On 9/28/22 15:48, Joel Fernandes wrote:
> >> > On Wed, Sep 28, 2022 at 02:49:02PM +0900, Hyeonggon Yoo wrote:
> >> >> On Tue, Sep 27, 2022 at 10:16:35PM -0700, Hugh Dickins wrote:
> >> >>> It's a bug in linux-next, but taking me too long to identify which
> >> >>> commit is "to blame", so let me throw it over to you without more
> >> >>> delay: I think __PageMovable() now needs to check !PageSlab().
> >>
> >> When I tried that, the result wasn't really nice:
> >>
> >> https://lore.kernel.org/all/aec59f53-0e53-1736-5932-25407125d4d4@suse.cz/
> >>
> >> And what if there's another conflicting page "type" later. Or the debugging
> >> variant of rcu_head in struct page itself. The __PageMovable() is just too
> >> fragile.
> >
> > I don't disagree (and don't really know all the things you're thinking
> > of in there). But if it's important to rescue this feature for 6.1, a
> > different approach may be the very simple patch below (I met a similar
> > issue with OPTIMIZE_FOR_SIZE in i915 a year ago, and just remembered).
> >
> > But you be the judge of it: (a) I do not know whether rcu_free_slab
> > is the only risky address ever stuffed into that field; and (b) I'm
> > clueless when it comes to those architectures (powerpc etc) where the
> > the address of a function is something different from the address of
> > the function (have I conveyed my cluelessness adequately?).
>
> Thanks a lot Hugh! That's a sufficiently small fix (compared to the other
> options) that I'm probably give it one last try.

I suddenly worried that you might be waiting on me for a Signed-off-by,
which I couldn't give until I researched my reservations (a) and (b):
but I'm pleased to see from your kernel.org tree that you've gone ahead
and folded it in - thanks.

Regarding (a): great, you've found it too, mm/slab.c's kmem_rcu_free()
looks like it needs the same __aligned(4) as mm/slub.c's rcu_free_slabi().

Regarding (b): I booted the PowerMac G5 to take a look, and dredged up
the relevant phrase "function descriptor" from depths of my memory: I
was right to consider that case, but it's not a worry - the first field
of a function descriptor structure (on all the architectures I found it)
is the function address, so the function descriptor address would be
aligned 4 or 8 anyway.

Regarding "conflicting" alignment requests: yes, I agree with you,
it would have to be a toolchain bug if when asked to align 2 and to
align 4, it chose not to align 4.

So, no worries at my end now.
Hugh