Revert "SLUB: Alternate fast paths using cmpxchg_local"
This reverts commit 1f84260c8ce3b1ce26d4c1d6dedc2f33a3a29c0c, which is
suspected to be the reason for some very occasional and hard-to-trigger
crashes that usually look related to memory allocation (mostly reported
in networking, but since that's generally the most common source of
shortlived allocations - and allocations in interrupt contexts - that in
itself is not a big clue).
See for example
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9973
http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/2/19/278
etc.
One promising suspicion for what the root cause of bug is (which also
explains why it's so hard to trigger in practice) came from Eric
Dumazet:
"I wonder how SLUB_FASTPATH is supposed to work, since it is affected
by a classical ABA problem of lockless algo.
cmpxchg_local(&c->freelist, object, object[c->offset]) can succeed,
while an interrupt came (on this cpu), and several allocations were
done, and one free was performed at the end of this interruption, so
'object' was recycled.
c->freelist can then contain the previous value (object), but
object[c->offset] was changed by IRQ.
We then put back in freelist an already allocated object."
but another reason for the revert is simply that everybody agrees that
this code was the main suspect just by virtue of the pattern of oopses.
Cc: Torsten Kaiser <just.for.lkml@googlemail.com>
Cc: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Cc: Mathieu Desnoyers <mathieu.desnoyers@polymtl.ca>
Cc: Pekka Enberg <penberg@cs.helsinki.fi>
Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Cc: Eric Dumazet <dada1@cosmosbay.com>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
1 file changed