Re: [RFC v2 2/3] atomic: Specify alignment for atomic_t and atomic64_t

[Finn Thain]

On Tue, 23 Sep 2025, I wrote:

> 
> ... there's still some kmem cache or other allocator somewhere that has 
> produced some misaligned path and dentry structures. So we get 
> misaligned atomics somewhere in the VFS and TTY layers. I was unable to 
> find those allocations.
> 

It turned out that the problem wasn't dynamic allocations, it was a local 
variable in the core locking code (kernel/locking/rwsem.c): a misaligned 
long used with an atomic operation (cmpxchg). To get natural alignment for 
64-bit quantities, I had to align other local variables as well, such as 
the one in ktime_get_real_ts64_mg() that's used with 
atomic64_try_cmpxchg(). The atomic_t branch in my github repo has the 
patches I wrote for that.

To silence the misalignment WARN from CONFIG_DEBUG_ATOMIC, for 64-bit 
atomic operations, for my small m68k .config, it was also necesary to 
increase ARCH_SLAB_MINALIGN to 8. However, I'm not advocating a 
ARCH_SLAB_MINALIGN increase, as that wastes memory. I think it might be 
more useful to limit the alignment test for CONFIG_DEBUG_ATOMIC, as 
follows.


diff --git a/include/linux/instrumented.h b/include/linux/instrumented.h
index 402a999a0d6b..cd569a87c0a8 100644
--- a/include/linux/instrumented.h
+++ b/include/linux/instrumented.h
@@ -68,7 +68,7 @@ static __always_inline void instrument_atomic_read(const volatile void *v, size_
 {
 	kasan_check_read(v, size);
 	kcsan_check_atomic_read(v, size);
-	WARN_ON_ONCE(IS_ENABLED(CONFIG_DEBUG_ATOMIC) && ((unsigned long)v & (size - 1)));
+	WARN_ON_ONCE(IS_ENABLED(CONFIG_DEBUG_ATOMIC) && ((unsigned long)v & (size - 1) & 3));
 }
 
 /**
@@ -83,7 +83,7 @@ static __always_inline void instrument_atomic_write(const volatile void *v, size
 {
 	kasan_check_write(v, size);
 	kcsan_check_atomic_write(v, size);
-	WARN_ON_ONCE(IS_ENABLED(CONFIG_DEBUG_ATOMIC) && ((unsigned long)v & (size - 1)));
+	WARN_ON_ONCE(IS_ENABLED(CONFIG_DEBUG_ATOMIC) && ((unsigned long)v & (size - 1) & 3));
 }
 
 /**
@@ -98,7 +98,7 @@ static __always_inline void instrument_atomic_read_write(const volatile void *v,
 {
 	kasan_check_write(v, size);
 	kcsan_check_atomic_read_write(v, size);
-	WARN_ON_ONCE(IS_ENABLED(CONFIG_DEBUG_ATOMIC) && ((unsigned long)v & (size - 1)));
+	WARN_ON_ONCE(IS_ENABLED(CONFIG_DEBUG_ATOMIC) && ((unsigned long)v & (size - 1) & 3));
 }
 
 /**