On 2/14/19 12:50 AM, Alexey Brodkin wrote: >>>>> I suspect the slab allocator should be returning 8 byte aligned addresses >>>>> on all systems.... >>>> >>>> why ? As I understand it is still not fool proof against the expected alignment of >>>> inner members. There ought to be a better way to enforce all this. >>> >>> I agree that for ARC ARCH_SLAB_MINALIGN should be at least 8. >> >> This issue aside, are there other reasons ? Because making it 8 on ARC is just >> pending the eventuality for later. > > But that's pretty much the same for other 32-bit arches that have 64-bit atomics > like ARM etc. From what I may see from ARM's documentation for LDREXD/SRREXD they > require double-word alignment of data as well. Right LLOCKD/SCONDD (64-bit exclusive load/store) needs 64-bit aligned effective addresses for micro-arch reasons (1 vs 2 cache lines) etc. So lets try to unpack this for me. Say we had. struct foo { int a; atomic64_t b; }; The atomic64_t (which for ARC and most others is u64 __attribute__((aligned(8)) *already ensures* that there a 4 b padding is generated by gcc (I just confirmed with a simple test case). #ifdef DOALIGN__ #define my_u64 __u64 __attribute__((aligned(8))) #else #define my_u64 __u64 #endif struct foo on_heap; printf(%d", &on_heap.b) $ arc-linux-gcc -O2 test.c -DDOALIGN__ -c --save-temps main: mov_s r1,@on_heap+8 <---- mov_s r0,@.LC0 b @printf W/o the alignment attribute (say normal LDD/STD) $ arc-linux-gcc -O2 test.c -c --save-temps main: mov_s r1,@on_heap+4 mov_s r0,@.LC0 b @printf So indeed your patch aligns dynamic structs to 64-bit, ensuring any embedded aligned_u64 to be 64-bit aligned as well. Phew ! > That said if for some reason atomic64_t variable is unaligned execution on > any (or at least most) 32-bit architectures will lead to run-time failure, > i.e. we'll know about it and this will be fixed. > > And what I'm doing by that change (ARCH_SLAB_MINALIGN=8 for ARC) I'm just > working-around peculiarity of ARC ABI. Right. > > Out of curiosity I checked if there're any other occurrences of "alingof(long long)" > and there seems to be a couple of more: > ----------------------------------->8----------------------------- > # git grep alignof | grep "long long" > > ... > > kernel/workqueue.c:5693: WARN_ON(__alignof__(struct pool_workqueue) < __alignof__(long long)); > mm/slab.c:155:#define REDZONE_ALIGN max(BYTES_PER_WORD, __alignof__(unsigned long long)) For ARC, it will be max(4,4) so 4 for others 32-bit,it will be max(4,8) So indeed it makes sense to change it. > mm/slab.c:2034: if (ralign > __alignof__(unsigned long long)) > ----------------------------------->8----------------------------- > > Not really sure how important is "kernel/workqueue.c" part but in case of "mm/slab.c" > shouldn't we use ARCH_SLAB_MINALIGN there instead of that "not very meaningful" __alignof__(long long)?