Slab allocators: support __GFP_ZERO in all allocators

A kernel convention for many allocators is that if __GFP_ZERO is passed to an
allocator then the allocated memory should be zeroed.

This is currently not supported by the slab allocators.  The inconsistency
makes it difficult to implement in derived allocators such as in the uncached
allocator and the pool allocators.

In addition the support zeroed allocations in the slab allocators does not
have a consistent API.  There are no zeroing allocator functions for NUMA node
placement (kmalloc_node, kmem_cache_alloc_node).  The zeroing allocations are
only provided for default allocs (kzalloc, kmem_cache_zalloc_node).
__GFP_ZERO will make zeroing universally available and does not require any
addititional functions.

So add the necessary logic to all slab allocators to support __GFP_ZERO.

The code is added to the hot path.  The gfp flags are on the stack and so the
cacheline is readily available for checking if we want a zeroed object.

Zeroing while allocating is now a frequent operation and we seem to be
gradually approaching a 1-1 parity between zeroing and not zeroing allocs.
The current tree has 3476 uses of kmalloc vs 2731 uses of kzalloc.

Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Acked-by: Pekka Enberg <penberg@cs.helsinki.fi>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 2 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/mm/slob.c b/mm/slob.c
index 41d32c3c0be..b3a45588fc4 100644
--- a/mm/slob.c
+++ b/mm/slob.c
@@ -334,6 +334,8 @@ static void *slob_alloc(size_t size, gfp_t gfp, int align, int node)
 		BUG_ON(!b);
 		spin_unlock_irqrestore(&slob_lock, flags);
 	}
+	if (unlikely((gfp & __GFP_ZERO) && b))
+		memset(b, 0, size);
 	return b;
 }