On Thu, Feb 10, 2022 at 10:16:48AM +0100, Jan Kara wrote: > On Wed 09-02-22 12:11:37, Paul E. McKenney wrote: > > On Wed, Feb 09, 2022 at 07:10:10PM +0100, Jan Kara wrote: > > > On Wed 09-02-22 11:57:42, Qian Cai wrote: > > > > Since the linux-next commit 120aa5e57479 (mm: Check for > > > > SLAB_TYPESAFE_BY_RCU and __GFP_ZERO slab allocation), we will get a > > > > boot warning. Avoid it by calling synchronize_rcu() before the zeroing. > > > > > > > > Signed-off-by: Qian Cai <quic_qiancai@xxxxxxxxxxx> > > > > > > No, the performance impact of this would be just horrible. Can you > > > ellaborate a bit why SLAB_TYPESAFE_BY_RCU + __GFP_ZERO is a problem and why > > > synchronize_rcu() would be needed here before the memset() please? I mean > > > how is zeroing here any different from the memory just being used? > > > > Suppose a reader picks up a pointer to a memory block, then that memory > > is freed. No problem, given that this is a SLAB_TYPESAFE_BY_RCU slab, > > so the memory won't be freed while the reader is accessing it. But while > > the reader is in the process of validating the block, it is zeroed. > > > > How does the validation step handle this in all cases? > > > > If you have a way of handling this, I will of course drop the patch. > > And learn something new, which is always a good thing. ;-) > > So I maybe missed something when implementing the usage of journal_heads > under RCU but let's have a look. An example of RCU user of journal heads > is fs/jbd2/transaction.c:jbd2_write_access_granted(). It does: > > rcu_read_lock(); > > // This part fetches journal_head from buffer_head - not related to > // our slab RCU discussion > > if (!buffer_jbd(bh)) > goto out; > /* This should be bh2jh() but that doesn't work with inline functions */ > jh = READ_ONCE(bh->b_private); > if (!jh) > goto out; > > // The validation comes here > > /* For undo access buffer must have data copied */ > if (undo && !jh->b_committed_data) > goto out; OK, so if *jh was freed and re-zallocated in the meantime, this test should fail. One concern would be if the zeroing was not at least eight bytes at a time, maybe due to overly eager use of fancy SIMD hardware. Though perhaps you also do something about ->b_committed_data on the free path, the commit-done path, or whatever? (I do see a "jh->b_committed_data = NULL" on what might well be the commit-done path.) > if (READ_ONCE(jh->b_transaction) != handle->h_transaction && > READ_ONCE(jh->b_next_transaction) != handle->h_transaction) > goto out; And same with these guys. > // Then some more checks unrelated to the slab itself. > > /* > * There are two reasons for the barrier here: > * 1) Make sure to fetch b_bh after we did previous checks so that we > * detect when jh went through free, realloc, attach to transaction > * while we were checking. Paired with implicit barrier in that path. > * 2) So that access to bh done after jbd2_write_access_granted() > * doesn't get reordered and see inconsistent state of concurrent > * do_get_write_access(). > */ > smp_mb(); > if (unlikely(jh->b_bh != bh)) > goto out; > > // If all passed > > rcu_read_unlock(); > return true; > > So if we are going to return true from the function, we know that 'jh' was > attached to handle->h_transaction at some point. And when 'jh' was attached > to handle->h_transaction, the transaction was holding reference to the 'jh' > and our 'handle' holds reference to the transaction so 'jh' could not be > freed since that moment. I.e., we are sure our reference to the handle keeps > 'jh' alive and we can safely use it. > > I don't see how any amount of scribbling over 'jh' could break this > validation. But maybe it is just a lack of my imagination :). Regardless of whether you are suffering a lack of imagination, you have clearly demonstrated that it is possible to correctly use the SLAB_TYPESAFE_BY_RCU flag in conjunction with kmem_cache_alloc(), thus demonstrating that I was suffering from a lack of imagination. ;-) I have therefore reverted my commit. Please accept my apologies for the hassle! Thanx, Paul
