Re: lockdep complaints in slab allocator

From: Peter Zijlstra
Date: Fri Nov 20 2009 - 10:09:30 EST


On Fri, 2009-11-20 at 13:05 +0200, Pekka Enberg wrote:
> Peter Zijlstra kirjoitti:
> > On Fri, 2009-11-20 at 12:38 +0200, Pekka Enberg wrote:
> >>
> >> On Fri, Nov 20, 2009 at 11:25 AM, Peter Zijlstra <peterz@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >>> 2) propagate the nesting information and user spin_lock_nested(), given
> >>> that slab is already a rat's nest, this won't make it any less obvious.
> >> spin_lock_nested() doesn't really help us here because there's a
> >> _real_ possibility of a recursive spin lock here, right?
> >
> > Well, I was working under the assumption that your analysis of it being
> > a false positive was right ;-)
> >
> > I briefly tried to verify that, but got lost and gave up, at which point
> > I started looking for ways to annotate.
>
> Uh, ok, so apparently I was right after all. There's a comment in
> free_block() above the slab_destroy() call that refers to the comment
> above alloc_slabmgmt() function definition which explains it all.
>
> Long story short: ->slab_cachep never points to the same kmalloc cache
> we're allocating or freeing from. Where do we need to put the
> spin_lock_nested() annotation? Would it be enough to just use it in
> cache_free_alien() for alien->lock or do we need it in
> cache_flusharray() as well?

You'd have to somehow push the nested state down from the
kmem_cache_free() call in slab_destroy() to all nc->lock sites below.


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