Re: [PATCH v2 1/4] kernfs: kvmalloc xattr value instead of kmalloc

[Joe Perches]

On Thu, 2020-03-05 at 13:16 -0800, Daniel Xu wrote:
> It's not really necessary to have contiguous physical memory for xattr
> values. We no longer need to worry about higher order allocations
> failing with kvmalloc, especially because the xattr size limit is at
> 64K.

So why use vmalloc memory at all?

> diff --git a/fs/xattr.c b/fs/xattr.c
']
> @@ -817,7 +817,7 @@ struct simple_xattr *simple_xattr_alloc(const void *value, size_t size)
>  	if (len < sizeof(*new_xattr))
>  		return NULL;
>  
> -	new_xattr = kmalloc(len, GFP_KERNEL);
> +	new_xattr = kvmalloc(len, GFP_KERNEL);

Why is this sensible?
vmalloc memory is a much more limited resource.

Also, it seems as if the function should set
new_xattr->name to NULL before the return.