slab: document SLAB_DESTROY_BY_RCU

Explain this SLAB_DESTROY_BY_RCU thing...

[hugh@veritas.com: add a pointer to comment in mm/slab.c]
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Acked-by: Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com>
Acked-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Acked-by: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com>
Signed-off-by: Pekka Enberg <penberg@cs.helsinki.fi>

1 files changed, 28 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/include/linux/slab.h b/include/linux/slab.h
index ba965c84ae06..000da12b5cf0 100644
--- a/include/linux/slab.h
+++ b/include/linux/slab.h
@@ -23,6 +23,34 @@
 #define SLAB_CACHE_DMA          0x00004000UL    /* Use GFP_DMA memory */
 #define SLAB_STORE_USER         0x00010000UL    /* DEBUG: Store the last owner for bug hunting */
 #define SLAB_PANIC              0x00040000UL    /* Panic if kmem_cache_create() fails */
+/*
+ * SLAB_DESTROY_BY_RCU - **WARNING** READ THIS!
+ *
+ * This delays freeing the SLAB page by a grace period, it does _NOT_
+ * delay object freeing. This means that if you do kmem_cache_free()
+ * that memory location is free to be reused at any time. Thus it may
+ * be possible to see another object there in the same RCU grace period.
+ *
+ * This feature only ensures the memory location backing the object
+ * stays valid, the trick to using this is relying on an independent
+ * object validation pass. Something like:
+ *
+ *  rcu_read_lock()
+ * again:
+ *  obj = lockless_lookup(key);
+ *  if (obj) {
+ *    if (!try_get_ref(obj)) // might fail for free objects
+ *      goto again;
+ *
+ *    if (obj->key != key) { // not the object we expected
+ *      put_ref(obj);
+ *      goto again;
+ *    }
+ *  }
+ *  rcu_read_unlock();
+ *
+ * See also the comment on struct slab_rcu in mm/slab.c.
+ */
 #define SLAB_DESTROY_BY_RCU     0x00080000UL    /* Defer freeing slabs to RCU */
 #define SLAB_MEM_SPREAD         0x00100000UL    /* Spread some memory over cpuset */
 #define SLAB_TRACE              0x00200000UL    /* Trace allocations and frees */