Re: [PATCH] slab: respect architecture and caller mandated alignment

[Heiko Carstens <heiko.carstens@de.ibm.com>]

On Thu, Jul 27, 2006 at 07:25:56PM -0700, Christoph Lameter wrote:
> On Thu, 27 Jul 2006, Pekka J Enberg wrote:
> 
> > As explained by Heiko, on s390 (32-bit) ARCH_KMALLOC_MINALIGN is set to eight
> > because their common I/O layer allocates data structures that need to have an
> > eight byte alignment. This does not work when CONFIG_SLAB_DEBUG is enabled
> > because kmem_cache_create will override alignment to BYTES_PER_WORD which is
> > four.
> > 
> > So change kmem_cache_create to ensure cache alignment is always at minimum
> > what the architecture or caller mandates even if slab debugging is enabled.
> 
> Note that this will disable SLAB_RED_ZONE and SLAB_STORE_USER 
> for the following SLAB_DEBUG cases:
> 
> 1. For all slabs if an arch sets ARCH_SLAB_MINALIGN > BYTES_PER_WORD
> [...]
> 2. For all general (kmalloc) slabs if an arch sets
>    ARCH_KMALLOC_MINALIGN > BYTES_PER_WORD
> [...]
> F.e. S/390 will not be able to use slab debug for the general slabs.
> 
> You may want to document that change somewhere.

It is already documented (see top of slab.c). The only thing that was wrong was
that ARCH_SLAB_MINALIGN and ARCH_KMALLOC_MINALIGN didn't have the effect like
one would expect from the documentation.