Re: [LTP] [linux-next:master] [mm] 47325a5c88: WARNING:at_mm/slub.c:#free_large_kmalloc

Usama Arif
2024-07-10T19:02:55Z

On 10/07/2024 21:49, Hugh Dickins wrote:
> It's a long time since I was active hereabouts, but the bot report
> and your flurry of updates make me think that you should step back,
> slow down, and look more carefully at the precedents here.
>
> IIRC, the main problem is that parts of the swap_info_struct can
> still be in use from before while you're wanting to set up new values.
> Observe how alloc_swap_info() may return a fresh or an old allocation.
> Observe how enable_swap_info() is called after getting swapon_mutex
> late in swapon(), once past all possiblities of error.
>
> I expect that your new zeromap needs to be taking the same care as is
> taken with swap_map and cluster_info: to be safe, follow their example
> in both swapon() and swapoff().
>
> Hugh

Thanks, yeah sent too many in quick succession :). Will be more careful next time.

Both the 2nd and 3rd version are careful to solve the problem of using old allocation
which you described.

The 2nd one takes care of it in the same way as swap_map.

But I believe its unnecessary to do all that change in the 2nd version, when you can just
set it to NULL after kvfree, which is a much smaller change and takes care of reusing old
allocation equally well.