Re: lockdep complaints in slab allocator

From: Pekka Enberg
Date: Fri Nov 20 2009 - 06:06:06 EST


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?

Pekka
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