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

Linus Torvalds torvalds at linux-foundation.org
Wed Apr 20 12:33:39 PDT 2022


On Wed, Apr 20, 2022 at 12:08 PM Catalin Marinas
<catalin.marinas at arm.com> wrote:
>
> With kstrdup() modified to pass __GFP_PACKED (as per the last hunk in
> the diff below), I get just after boot:
>
> kmalloc-128         8966   9056    128   32
> kmalloc-96             0      0     96   42
> kmalloc-64           192    192     64   64
> kmalloc-32           768    768     32  128
> kmalloc-16          2048   2048     16  256
> kmalloc-8           2560   2560      8  512
>
> So that's probably the simplest approach and using the ftrace histogram
> we can add the flag to more places.

I agree that this seems to be the safest thing to do, and maybe
__GFP_PACKED is a better flag name than __GFP_NODMA.

That said, It worries me a bit in that to me "PACKED" implies "no
alignment at all". And I could _easily_ see people still wanting to do
8-byte allocations that have 8-byte alignment because it's some kind
of private pointer thing or whatever.

For "kstrdup()", a flag like __GFP_PACKED makes 100% sense, since it
literally wants byte alignment.

But what about those "random small structures" cases?

Anyway, I'm perfectly happy calling it __GFP_PACKED, but at a minimum
document that "packed" in this case still means "__alignof__(unsigned
long long)" or something like that?

                      Linus



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