[PATCH net-next v6 4/8] mm/slab: Give bucket caches the alignment of the caches they mirror

From: Kees Cook

Date: Tue Oct 06 2026 - 05:22:13 EST


A bucket set is created with kmem_cache_create_usercopy(..., align = 0),
so calculate_alignment() falls back to arch_slab_minalign(), typically 8
bytes. The general kmalloc caches it stands in for are created through
create_boot_cache(), which starts from ARCH_KMALLOC_MINALIGN and raises
it to the largest power-of-two divisor of the size:

if (flags & SLAB_KMALLOC)
align = max(align, 1U << (ffs(size) - 1));

This is only a problem when slab metadata is enabled with
CONFIG_KASAN=y, CONFIG_SLUB_DEBUG_ON=y, or "slab_debug=...", because
metadata changes the stride size off a power of two, for example:

size 128: bucket align=8 size=224 | kmalloc align=128 size=384
size 512: bucket align=8 size=608 | kmalloc align=512 size=1536
size 2048: bucket align=8 size=2144 | kmalloc align=2048 size=6144

So bucket allocations will fail the IS_ALIGNED(p, ARCH_DMA_MINALIGN)
check, potentially creating problems for non-coherent DMA situation.

Take the alignment from the kmalloc cache being mirrored, which is where
the size and the name suffix already come from, so a caller moving from
kmalloc() keeps the alignment it had.

Don't take an alignment from the caller instead. With
CONFIG_SLAB_BUCKETS=n, or when kmem_buckets_create() fails,
kmem_buckets_alloc() is served by the general kmalloc caches, which give
kmalloc()'s alignment and no other.

Fixes: b32801d1255be ("mm/slab: Introduce kmem_buckets_create() and family")
Assisted-by: LLM
Signed-off-by: Kees Cook <kees@xxxxxxxxxx>
---
mm/slab_common.c | 3 ++-
1 file changed, 2 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)

diff --git a/mm/slab_common.c b/mm/slab_common.c
index f8bb70d76eb4..885aafa23da7 100644
--- a/mm/slab_common.c
+++ b/mm/slab_common.c
@@ -481,7 +481,8 @@ kmem_buckets *kmem_buckets_create(const char *name, unsigned int useroffset,
if (WARN_ON(!cache_name))
goto fail;
(*b)[aligned_idx] = kmem_cache_create_usercopy(cache_name, size,
- 0, SLAB_NO_MERGE, cache_useroffset,
+ kmalloc_caches[KMALLOC_NORMAL][idx]->align,
+ SLAB_NO_MERGE, cache_useroffset,
cache_usersize, NULL);
kfree(cache_name);
if (WARN_ON(!(*b)[aligned_idx]))
--
2.55.0