linux-kernel - [PATCH] vfs: make sure struct filename->iname is word-aligned

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Date:   Thu,  1 Mar 2018 00:19:21 +0100
From:   Rasmus Villemoes <linux@...musvillemoes.dk>
To:     Alexander Viro <viro@...iv.linux.org.uk>
Cc:     Rasmus Villemoes <linux@...musvillemoes.dk>,
        linux-fsdevel@...r.kernel.org, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: [PATCH] vfs: make sure struct filename->iname is word-aligned

I noticed that offsetof(struct filename, iname) is actually 28 on 64
bit platforms, so we always pass an unaligned pointer to
strncpy_from_user. This is mostly a problem for those 64 bit platforms
without HAVE_EFFICIENT_UNALIGNED_ACCESS, but even on x86_64, unaligned
accesses carry a penalty.

A user-space microbenchmark doing nothing but strncpy_from_user from the
same (aligned) source string runs about 5% faster when the destination
is aligned. That number increases to 20% when the string is long
enough (~32 bytes) that we cross a cache line boundary - that's for
example the case for about half the files a "git status" in a kernel
tree ends up stat'ing.

This won't make any real-life workloads 5%, or even 1%, faster, but path
lookup is common enough that cutting even a few cycles should be
worthwhile. So ensure we always pass an aligned destination pointer to
strncpy_from_user. Instead of explicit padding, simply swap the refcnt
and aname members, as suggested by Al Viro.

Signed-off-by: Rasmus Villemoes <linux@...musvillemoes.dk>
---
 fs/namei.c         | 2 ++
 include/linux/fs.h | 2 +-
 2 files changed, 3 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)

diff --git a/fs/namei.c b/fs/namei.c
index 921ae32dbc80..5a66e7ca5d60 100644
--- a/fs/namei.c
+++ b/fs/namei.c
@@ -39,6 +39,7 @@
 #include <linux/bitops.h>
 #include <linux/init_task.h>
 #include <linux/uaccess.h>
+#include <linux/build_bug.h>

 #include "internal.h"
 #include "mount.h"
@@ -130,6 +131,7 @@ getname_flags(const char __user *filename, int flags, int *empty)
 	struct filename *result;
 	char *kname;
 	int len;
+	BUILD_BUG_ON(offsetof(struct filename, iname) % sizeof(long) != 0);

 	result = audit_reusename(filename);
 	if (result)
diff --git a/include/linux/fs.h b/include/linux/fs.h
index 2a815560fda0..d7b2caadb292 100644
--- a/include/linux/fs.h
+++ b/include/linux/fs.h
@@ -2380,8 +2380,8 @@ struct audit_names;
 struct filename {
 	const char		*name;	/* pointer to actual string */
 	const __user char	*uptr;	/* original userland pointer */
-	struct audit_names	*aname;
 	int			refcnt;
+	struct audit_names	*aname;
 	const char		iname[];
 };

-- 
2.15.1