Re: alignment faults in 3.6

On Thu, 2012-10-11 at 12:28 +0000, Arnd Bergmann wrote:

Rob Herring as the original reporter has dropped off the Cc list, adding
him back.

I assume that the calxeda xgmac driver is the culprit then. It uses
netdev_alloc_skb() rather than netdev_alloc_skb_ip_align() in
xgmac_rx_refill but it is not clear whether it does so intentionally
or by accident.

Thanks Arnd

It seems an accident, since driver doesnt check skb->data alignment at
all (this can change with SLAB debug on/off)

It also incorrectly adds 64 bytes to bfsize, there is no need for this.

(or if its needed, a comment would be nice, because on prior kernels,
this makes skb->head allocations uses kmalloc-4096 instead of
kmalloc-2048 slab cache... With 3.7 its less an issue now we use order-3
pages to deliver fragments for rx skbs

So the following patch should fix the alignment, and makes driver uses
half memory than before for stable kernels

diff --git a/drivers/net/ethernet/calxeda/xgmac.c b/drivers/net/ethernet/calxeda/xgmac.c
index 16814b3..a895e18 100644
--- a/drivers/net/ethernet/calxeda/xgmac.c
+++ b/drivers/net/ethernet/calxeda/xgmac.c

@@ -671,7 +671,8 @@ static void xgmac_rx_refill(struct xgmac_priv *priv)
 		p = priv->dma_rx + entry;
 
 		if (priv->rx_skbuff[entry] == NULL) {
-			skb = netdev_alloc_skb(priv->dev, priv->dma_buf_sz);
+			skb = netdev_alloc_skb_ip_align(priv->dev,
+							priv->dma_buf_sz);
 			if (unlikely(skb == NULL))
 				break;
 

@@ -703,7 +704,7 @@ static int xgmac_dma_desc_rings_init(struct net_device *dev)
 	/* Set the Buffer size according to the MTU;
 	 * indeed, in case of jumbo we need to bump-up the buffer sizes.
 	 */
-	bfsize = ALIGN(dev->mtu + ETH_HLEN + ETH_FCS_LEN + NET_IP_ALIGN + 64,
+	bfsize = ALIGN(dev->mtu + ETH_HLEN + ETH_FCS_LEN,
 		       64);
 
 	netdev_dbg(priv->dev, "mtu [%d] bfsize [%d]\n", dev->mtu, bfsize);