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Commit 63931eb9 authored by Vlastimil Babka's avatar Vlastimil Babka Committed by Linus Torvalds
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mm, page_alloc: disallow __GFP_COMP in alloc_pages_exact()

alloc_pages_exact*() allocates a page of sufficient order and then splits
it to return only the number of pages requested.  That makes it
incompatible with __GFP_COMP, because compound pages cannot be split.

As shown by [1] things may silently work until the requested size
(possibly depending on user) stops being power of two.  Then for
CONFIG_DEBUG_VM, BUG_ON() triggers in split_page().  Without
CONFIG_DEBUG_VM, consequences are unclear.

There are several options here, none of them great:

1) Don't do the splitting when __GFP_COMP is passed, and return the
   whole compound page.  However if caller then returns it via
   free_pages_exact(), that will be unexpected and the freeing actions
   there will be wrong.

2) Warn and remove __GFP_COMP from the flags.  But the caller may have
   really wanted it, so things may break later somewhere.

3) Warn and return NULL.  However NULL may be unexpected, especially
   for small sizes.

This patch picks option 2, because as Michal Hocko put it: "callers wanted
it" is much less probable than "caller is simply confused and more gfp
flags is surely better than fewer".

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20181126002805.GI18977@shao2-debian/T/#u

Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/0c6393eb-b28d-4607-c386-862a71f09de6@suse.cz


Signed-off-by: default avatarVlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
Acked-by: default avatarMichal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Acked-by: default avatarKirill A. Shutemov <kirill.shutemov@linux.intel.com>
Acked-by: default avatarMel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net>
Cc: Takashi Iwai <tiwai@suse.de>
Cc: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
parent 5fd4ca2d
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