Re: [PATCH] fork: Honor task_struct's declared alignment
From: Vlastimil Babka (SUSE)
Date: Fri Jul 17 2026 - 04:18:29 EST
On 7/10/26 14:39, Karl Mehltretter wrote:
> Since commit cb7ca40a3882 ("x86/fpu: Make task_struct::thread constant
> size"), struct task_struct is declared __attribute__((aligned(64))) on
> all architectures.
>
> But fork_init() still sets the task_struct slab cache's alignment to
>
> align = max(L1_CACHE_BYTES, ARCH_MIN_TASKALIGN)
>
> which is smaller than 64 on architectures whose cache lines are below
> 64 bytes: e.g. 32 on ARMv5.
>
> In practice plain SLUB happens to hand out 64-byte-aligned objects
> anyway. With CONFIG_SLUB_DEBUG_ON the red-zone padding shifts objects
> to the requested alignment.
>
> With CONFIG_UBSAN_ALIGNMENT=y a boot on QEMU versatilepb (ARM926EJ-S,
> v7.2-rc2, gcc 13.3) floods the console with reports like:
>
> UBSAN: misaligned-access in include/linux/sched.h:2087:9
> member access within misaligned address c295d7e0 for type 'struct task_struct'
> which requires 64 byte alignment
> CPU: 0 UID: 0 PID: 15 Comm: pr/ttyAMA-1 Not tainted 7.2.0-rc2 #1 VOLUNTARY
>
> Set the slab alignment to at least the type's declared alignment.
>
> Fixes: cb7ca40a3882 ("x86/fpu: Make task_struct::thread constant size")
> Assisted-by: Claude:claude-fable-5
> Signed-off-by: Karl Mehltretter <kmehltretter@xxxxxxxxx>
LGTM. Additionally I think you can replace the manual L1_CACHE_BYTES
handling with a SLAB_HWCACHE_ALIGN flag. That will apply cache_line_size().
> ---
> kernel/fork.c | 3 ++-
> 1 file changed, 2 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)
>
> diff --git a/kernel/fork.c b/kernel/fork.c
> index f0e2e131a9a5..b85cf1343329 100644
> --- a/kernel/fork.c
> +++ b/kernel/fork.c
> @@ -857,7 +857,8 @@ void __init fork_init(void)
> #ifndef ARCH_MIN_TASKALIGN
> #define ARCH_MIN_TASKALIGN 0
> #endif
> - int align = max_t(int, L1_CACHE_BYTES, ARCH_MIN_TASKALIGN);
> + int align = max3(L1_CACHE_BYTES, ARCH_MIN_TASKALIGN,
> + __alignof__(struct task_struct));
> unsigned long useroffset, usersize;
>
> /* create a slab on which task_structs can be allocated */