Re: [GIT PULL] tracing: Fixes to bootconfig memory management

[Mike Rapoport]

On Tue, Sep 14, 2021 at 11:01:31AM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 14, 2021 at 7:56 AM Steven Rostedt <rostedt@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > A couple of memory management fixes to the bootconfig code
> 
> These may be fixes, but they are too ugly to merit the tiny
> theoretical leak fix.
> 
> All of these are just plain wrong:
> 
> > +static void *init_xbc_data_copy __initdata;
> > +static phys_addr_t init_xbc_data_size __initdata;
> > +               init_xbc_data_copy = copy;
> > +               init_xbc_data_size = size + 1;
> > +       memblock_free(__pa(init_xbc_data_copy), init_xbc_data_size);
> 
> because the xbc code already saves these as xbc_data/xbc_data_size and
> that final free should just be done in xbc_destroy_all().
> 
> So this fix is pointlessly ugly to begin with.
> 
> But what I _really_ ended up reacting to was that
> 
> > +               memblock_free(__pa(copy), size + 1);
> 
> where that "copy" was allocated with
> 
>         copy = memblock_alloc(size + 1, SMP_CACHE_BYTES);
> 
> so it should damn well be free'd without any crazy "__pa()" games.
> 
> This is a memblock interface bug, plain and simple.
> 
> Mike - this craziness needs to just be fixed. If memblock_alloc()
> returns a virtual address, then memblock_free() should take one.

Yep, it was on my todo list. But since it was like this for years with both
memblock and bootmem I didn't prioritise this.
 
> Let's just get these interfaces fixed. It might be as simple as having
> a "memblock_free_phys()" interface, and doing a search-and-replace
> with coccinelle of
> 
>      memblock_free(__pa(xyz), .. -> memblock_free(xyz, ...
>      memblock_free(other, .. -> memblock_free_phys(other, ..
> 
> and adding the (trivial) internal helper functions to memblock,
> instead of making the atcual _users_ of memblock do insanely stupid
> and confusing things.

I've done the automated search and replace, with several fixups here and
there, so there is now memblock_phys_free(phys_addr_t addr) to match
memblock_phys_alloc() and memblock_free(void *ptr) to match
memblock_alloc().

The initial version is in memblock tree

https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/rppt/memblock.git/log/?h=memblock_free-cleanup/v0

I'm waiting for robots to run the builds before posting.

While doing the replacement I've found one mismatch in Xen code which used
memblock_free() to free a virtual pointer, but except that users seem to do
the correct thing, even if it is ugly __pa() conversions.

-- 
Sincerely yours,
Mike.