Thread (68 messages) 68 messages, 10 authors, 2025-09-19

Re: [PATCH v5 12/19] x86: Minimal SLAB alignment

From: Andrey Konovalov <andreyknvl@gmail.com>
Date: 2025-09-06 17:18:53
Also in: linux-doc, linux-kbuild, lkml, llvm

On Mon, Aug 25, 2025 at 10:29 PM Maciej Wieczor-Retman
[off-list ref] wrote:
quoted hunk ↗ jump to hunk
8 byte minimal SLAB alignment interferes with KASAN's granularity of 16
bytes. It causes a lot of out-of-bounds errors for unaligned 8 byte
allocations.

Compared to a kernel with KASAN disabled, the memory footprint increases
because all kmalloc-8 allocations now are realized as kmalloc-16, which
has twice the object size. But more meaningfully, when compared to a
kernel with generic KASAN enabled, there is no difference. Because of
redzones in generic KASAN, kmalloc-8' and kmalloc-16' object size is the
same (48 bytes). So changing the minimal SLAB alignment of the tag-based
mode doesn't have any negative impact when compared to the other
software KASAN mode.

Adjust x86 minimal SLAB alignment to match KASAN granularity size.

Signed-off-by: Maciej Wieczor-Retman <redacted>
---
Changelog v4:
- Extend the patch message with some more context and impact
  information.

Changelog v3:
- Fix typo in patch message 4 -> 16.
- Change define location to arch/x86/include/asm/cache.c.

 arch/x86/include/asm/cache.h | 4 ++++
 1 file changed, 4 insertions(+)
diff --git a/arch/x86/include/asm/cache.h b/arch/x86/include/asm/cache.h
index 69404eae9983..3232583b5487 100644
--- a/arch/x86/include/asm/cache.h
+++ b/arch/x86/include/asm/cache.h
@@ -21,4 +21,8 @@
 #endif
 #endif

+#ifdef CONFIG_KASAN_SW_TAGS
+#define ARCH_SLAB_MINALIGN (1ULL << KASAN_SHADOW_SCALE_SHIFT)
+#endif
+
 #endif /* _ASM_X86_CACHE_H */
--
2.50.1
Reviewed-by: Andrey Konovalov <andreyknvl@gmail.com>
Keyboard shortcuts
hback out one level
jnext message in thread
kprevious message in thread
ldrill in
Escclose help / fold thread tree
?toggle this help